


My Personal SPN Drabble Challenge

by Fenix21



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Awesome Bobby Singer, Betrayal, Big Brother Dean, Castiel's POV, Dean's Hell memories, Dean's POV, Dean's righteous rage, Dialogue-Only, Episode Codas, Experimental Style, Fire, Guilt, John's POV, Lucifer's POV, M/M, Michael's POV, Missing Scenes, Nightmares, POV Outsider, POV Second Person, Pining, Regret, Sam's POV, Sam's Powers, Unrequited Love, Wincest - Freeform, classic Winchester denial, john winchester is a good guy, loss fo faith, re-discovery of an established relationship, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2018-07-10 07:30:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 132
Words: 26,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6973231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fenix21/pseuds/Fenix21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of a failing muse, I set myself a challenge: to re-watch the entire series from front to back (because recent episodes have disappointed to such a degree that it has cast a pall over the entire SPN universe) and write one drabble per night per episode, as a coda or something episode centric.</p><p>The definition of a drabble being short fiction of 100 words or there abouts. A definition to which I will endeavor to stick as part of my challenge.</p><p>A/N: So, I got to thinking chapters might be a better way to go with this, because 11x22=...yeah, wow. That's a lot. So a little formatting change, folks. Sorry for any ensuing confusion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. S1-Coda: 'Pilot'

**Author's Note:**

> Sam dreams.

Sam's labored breathing punctuated the night.

Dean reached across the space, ready to rouse him from his nightmare, because in between Sam's rough, unsettled gulps of air there was the litany of, 'Jess…' and that could only mean there was fire behind his brother's twitching lids.

Dean dreamed of fire. Not so much now, but there were long stretches of nights when he was young, and no one to wake him. He acclimated to the heat, let the fire burn through him, purify his fear, and deaden him to the pain.

He retracted his hand, and let his brother dream.


	2. Coda: 'Wendigo'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam doubts.

_But in the meantime, I'm driving._

Dean hunkered down, against the door, pretended to doze. He knew what the driving was about. Escape. Escaping sleep. Escaping dreams. He'd been there a time or three himself. Black asphalt and yellow ribbon of road brought a haunted man better rest sometimes than a warm bed and easy woman. 

He waited.

'Dean…why did it leave me alive?'

 Thin whisper over the rumble of the road, echo of the old man's words. Dean sighed and sank further down in the seat, mumbled, 

'Didn't _leave_ you, Sammy. Wouldn't let it _take_ you…never will.'


	3. Coda: 'Dead in the Water'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some hunts fail.

_We can't save everybody, Dean._

 

Saving people, hunting things. Saving people… It was the only reward that made it worth the cost. Dean was okay with collateral damage. It happened. It was shit, but it happened. He was okay, too, with the deaths he couldn't help, the trail of corpses it took to get him on the case, but once he took point…? No one else died. 

Give no ground. Make no compromise. Put the monster down. He knew the drill, and it didn't include a life for a life. Fuck Sam's cosmic balance, anyway. _Everybody_ lives.

 

_Yeah. I know._


	4. Coda: 'Phantom Traveler'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean doubts.

_This is John Winchester. I can't be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean. He can help._

 

'It's like he planned this.' 

Sam's voice was small and hoarse in the dark, like he'd been fighting furious tears. 

Dean stared at the ceiling. 'No, man. No.'

Sheets rustled, and Dean could feel his brother's eyes on him. He wouldn't meet Sam's hard gaze. Didn't need to. Kid's eyes were only full of anger these days. And today had lit that too familiar spark of hatred for the old man's murky motives. Motives Dean dutifully ignored out of loyalty to his father. 

Where, though, was that loyalty now?

Dean turned away, face to the wall. His back to Sam.


	5. Inter-scene: 'Bloody Mary'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What once was there.

So close. So close…

Even with his eyes bleeding and secrets living under his skin all tangled up with the huge knot of grief in his guts, he knew his constricting heart was not only Mary's doing. 

He could still feel it. Feel the wanting.

'Sammy…'

Hands cradling his face. That old endearment, come so easy to his brother's lips. He couldn't admit, even to himself, how sweet it felt in his blood, how it eased the grief despite its own bitter aftertaste. 

He licked his lips, smiled his affirmation to Dean's silent, _Are you okay?_

'It's Sam,' he said.


	6. Inter-scene: 'Skin'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's buried deep down.

_He's sure got issues with you._

Dean had issues? Yeah, Sam knew Dean had issues. He wondered just how long it would take the Shifter to figure out what those issues were and dredge them to light, try and torture Sam with them. Because there was no surer way to break him than to bring that up, to force him to relive Dean's refusal of him all over again.

_You left._

Of course, Sam left. What choice did he have but to run, as far from himself and his brother and the thing between them that Dean couldn't bear to acknowledge. So yeah, Sam left. 

But now he was back.


	7. Coda: 'Hook Man'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time is supposed to heal.

Dean knew hunger. He knew grief. He'd seen them in all shapes, felt them in their varying intensities. What he was looking at in the mirror was grief mingled with hunger and refused by guilt. 

'We could stay,' Dean suggested, quietly, only half hopeful that Sam would accept.

'No,' Sam said.

Dean nodded, reluctant, glanced in the mirror again, saw the girl's eyes welling up and had half a mind to stay anyway. He could bring Sam around…

Sam closed his eyes and rested his head against the glass, curling inward, wounded far deeper than the gouge on his arm. Dean sighed and slipped the car into gear.

Then again…maybe not.

 


	8. Coda: 'Bugs'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good intentions and all...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it is probably universally agreed on in the SPN fandom that 'Bugs' was among the worst 10 episodes of the series if not THE worst. However, it did have some tender morsels regarding Sam and his relationship to John and how Dean's perspective was quite a bit different.

It hurt to watch Sam go.

Dean remembered the night. Razor sharp words thrown like knives. Fury at its flashpoint.

It hurt more now, though, to watch the kid crumble like this. 

Dean gambled that Sam would feel better knowing John had thought of him, looked after him those years between, but it backfired. Sam shifted, restless, in the seat; folded and unfolded maps, chewed the cap of his pen, trawled his notes and Dad's. Eyes shining. Sleepless. 

Now and again Dean heard a keening, pained and low. Longing. Needing. Somehow to make it right before it was too late.


	9. Coda: 'Home'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No chick-flick moments, Sammy...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is probably one of my top 10 favorite episodes, and this was the damn hardest thing to write in only 100 words...

'Dean…uh, thanks.

'It speaks! Thought you were sleepin', dude. You should be. You look exhausted. Thanks for what?'

'You know…'

'No. I don't know, Sammy. What? Savin' your ass? Again. From some friggin' poltergeist with a strangling fetish?'

'No. Man. The…the fire.'

'Huh?'

'You saved me, Dean. All those years ago? I wouldn't be here if…'

'Aw, c'mon, man, don't go all weepy on me.'

'Dean, I'm just trying to say—'

'Hey. What else would I have done, huh? 'Sides…Dad told me to.'

'Yeah…yeah. Still, though. I kinda owe you my life, you know?'

'Dude. Whatever.'

 


	10. Inter-scene: 'Asylum'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellicott said, one honest thing.

'This brother you're road tripping with. How do you feel about him?'

Sam froze up, stunned.

_Feel about him? I HATE him. He's bossy and overbearing, and all he does is follow orders. It's like he can't even think for himself…or doesn't want to._

It was on the tip of Sam's tongue to say it, but he choked on the words.

Dean was Sam's first memory, the strong arms that held him safe, the voice that soothed his nighttime fears, the smile that cured his tears, and the heartbeat Sam set his life by.

He smiled. 'I…love him.'


	11. Inter-scene: 'Scarecrow'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turnabout isn't always fair play.

 

'I will leave your ass!'

It's about survival. Be the first to step off the cliff, because you can't be the one left standing behind. Not again.

'That's what I want you to do!'

 _GodDAMN_ that goddamn kid!

'Good-bye, Sam.'

Short, clipped. Cough the words up quick, before you can't. Get out of here before he turns around again. Drive away with your guts in knots, the fibers of your soul screaming in rebellion, the fine thin thread that came so…so close to snapping before, spooling out behind you.

But it's your choice this time.

It doesn't help.


	12. Coda: 'Faith'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another one of those episodes that was just too damn perfect and made this a near impossible task.

'We did the right thing,' Sam said.

Dean ignored him, blindly packed his duffle, mind caught in the loop of a promised prayer for the girl he'd killed. The one still walking and talking, but dead nonetheless.

'We couldn't let Sue-Ann play god,' Sam insisted, following his brother's thoughts easily.

Dean yanked on the zipper. 'But didn't _we_? Didn't _you_?'

Sam flinched. 'You're worth it, Dean. I'd do it again.'

Dean glared. Marshall died because they didn't know better. Layla was going to die because they did. And there was nothing Dean could find in his heart worth that.


	13. Inter-scene: 'Route 666'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And slowly, he awakens.

She was hot and sweet and slick between his thighs. Soft against his chest. Tiny in his arms. His hands spanned the breadth of her back with ease, and she felt like the weight of no more than a hot summer breeze laying across him. Fragile and insubstantial as that fell breath of season.

But in the darkest, sleeping parts of him that had begun to yawn and stretch these last weeks, he yearned for the weight and press of another body; lean, lanky muscle not quite grown into itself; a broad, strong back solid under his hands.

_Brother mine…_


	14. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Nightmare'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sins of the father and a brother's love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so this was another one of those with just TOO MANY opportunities, and so you get a twofer, lucky youse :))

'When my Dad used to look at me, there was hate in his eyes. Do you know what that feels like?'

It took Sam a moment, to chop through the bullshit, all his own old and worn out excuses, to get to the truth. One he'd had a very hard time seeing clearly until this moment.

John Winchester was a good father.

The man had his flaws, but there had never been an ounce of blame in his eyes for either of his boys over Mary's death. Instead, he had loved them more fiercely, cherished them more deeply, and fought to protect them from every harm. 

Sam swallowed. 'No. I don't.'

 

 

_As long as I'm around, nothing bad is gonna happen to you._

It was odd hearing Dean say it, like Sam was five again and Dean was soothing away imaginary monsters in his nightmares. But it was a promise, and Sam trusted it like he had always trusted Dean, from his first stumbling steps and broken words, to the steady hands that helped him fire his first gun when he'd learned the real monsters weren't in nightmares. 

Sam might dream of death and the world might burn around them, but he was forever safe inside that promise.


	15. Coda: 'The Benders'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes you have to take a second to appreciate what you have.

'People, huh?' Dean murmured taking another pull from their 'medicinal' whiskey.

Sam was settled on his knees between Dean's thighs, anti-biotic ointment in hand, medical tape and a square of gauze on the bed beside Dean's hip.

'Yeah. Like you said. Worse than the monsters.'

Dean's hand moved of its own accord, slipped into Sam's hair, and clenched tightly. Sam swallowed, locked eyes with his brother. Dean said nothing. His hand slid down, traced the line of Sam's neck, caught for a second at his collar, then pressed hard over his heart.

Sam's fingers closed around Dean's wrist.

'Right here, man. 'M right here,' he said softly.

Dean nodded once, took another drink, his hand dropping from Sam's grip.

'Yeah…yeah.'


	16. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Shadow'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Between the lines and how things change.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, you get another twofer, because we all KNEW I was going for that conversation. It was always going to happen. And I've been feeling very partial to John recently...

'Dude, what’s your problem?' 

_Please, Dean…please…_

'Why do you think I drag you everywhere? Huh? I mean, why do you think I came and got you at Stanford in the first place?'

 _Because I can't_ be _without you, and it was the perfect excuse to get you back. Do you_ get _that?_

‘Cause Dad was in trouble. ‘Cause you wanted to find the thing that killed Mom.'

_I can't hope for anything else, Dean. I can't. I can't do this again._

'Yes, that, but it’s more than that, man. You and me…and Dad—I mean, I want us….I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again.'

_Sammy, please, you've gotta hear me, 'cause I can't say it any plainer and if you try and make me, I—I can't._

'Dean, we are a family. I’d do anything for you. But things will never be the way they were before.'

_Or the way they were almost before I told you I loved you._

'Could be.'

_Sammy…_

'I don’t want them to be. I'm not gonna live this life forever. Dean, when this is all over, you’re gonna have to let me go my own way.'

_I won't take half measures, Dean. I wouldn't then. I won't now. I love you. You've got to love me, too. I can't live any other way._

 

 

He hadn't seen his boys in months. Not even in Lawrence had he dared get close enough to glimpse them. 

It had been nearly a year since his last circuit through Palo Alto, and Sam was looking leaner, sparer, harder than ever. His eyes were darker now with vengeance and fury slow burning deep down.

Like Father, like son.

Dean, though, despite his wounds, looked better. Like he had shed a singular weight that had dragged at him since the night Sam left. His eyes nearly glowed in the darkness. Set afire with purpose again.

It proved what he had always known…his boys needed each other far more than they needed him.


	17. Coda: 'Hell House'

'Truce?'

Sam regretted asking a little. It was childish, true—could and _would_ escalate beyond simple things like itching powder and superglued beer bottles—and past pranks had occasionally resulted in physical damage. They were older now. Not necessarily wiser.

But it meant giving up Dean's easy laughter and easier smiles. He'd been…free these last few days, both their minds occupied in the here and now with their current game of one-upmanship, Jess and Dad and the demon quiet in the background for the first time in months. Not standing between them. 

Dean nodded, smile already dimming.

'Truce.'


	18. Coda: 'Something Wicked'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean's shoulders have always been broad.

So much guilt. 

Sam didn't wonder anymore how his brother's shoulders had grown so broad so quickly. Carrying all that weight. 

_I nearly got you killed._

But not only that—as if that wasn't enough for a grown man to carry, let alone a child—there was the death of Sam's innocence. 

He'd never fully appreciated what it cost Dean to steal that from him. No—not steal. It wasn't _Dean's_ fault. Sam had thrust it at him with both hands—demanded the truth. 

He had no right to ask for it back. 

No right to add to that weight.


	19. Coda: 'Provenance'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Careful what you push for...

'That's m'boy.'

The words came out with a smile, because if they didn't, he'd cry. 

The supple, worn leather on the steering wheel still creaked under his fisting hands as he tried to keep his eyes from sliding to the rearview, tried to keep from seeing Sam pull Sarah close and then closer—breathing out his pain and loneliness into the softness of her mouth, clawing out a moment of happiness with fingers hooked into her shoulders, back, molding her to him, hip to sternum, no space between.

The longing bit deep, sudden, straight to his spine. 

And he cried.


	20. Inter-scene: 'Dead Man's Blood'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John watches Sam...and wonders.

Restless, like a caged animal, but the instincts aren't animal. They're calculating, honed, sharp the way he'd made sure they would be. 

Footsteps scuffing carpet, fingers flexing against denim, all that nervous energy making rounds from bed to door and back, while he watches, thinks about how his youngest is such a painful reminder of his own past. 

He'd made his own worn paths in countless motel rooms—pining, desperate, vengeful. 

Sudden cold breeze from the open door.

'Whew. Man, some heavy security to protect a bunch of dead guys,' Dean says.

There is instant relief. All the tension bleeds away. Animal intensity vanished.

And John wonders...not so much the same, after all.


	21. Coda: 'Salvation'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even when Dean can't say it, Sam knows it.

_It's suicide!_

_I don't care!_

_…I do!_

 

'Dean, we have to finish this.'

'I know.'

'No matter what it takes.'

'No.'

'Dean—'

'No.'

'Dean.'

'Don't try any of your damn psychology on me, college boy. It won't work.'

'Dean, if we don't—'

'I don't give a _fuck_ , Sammy!'

'…okay, Dean. Okay. You and me. To the end.'

'Damn straight. To the end. _Together_. And no more just-in-case-speeches!'

'No more speeches.'

'I didn't fucking save you for you to go get yourself killed.'

'I know.'

'It ain't hap'nin!' 

'I know.'

'Not on my watch.'

'Okay.'

'Sammy, dammit—!'

'I love you, too, Dean.'

'…'

 


	22. Interscene: 'Devil's Trap'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean isn't so sure anymore what victory really means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To Lochinvar who will be happy to know this took me four hours and five revisions ;p

He watched her die and felt part of himself go with her.

He was losing. 

The goal was in sight, just five hundred miles and a gunshot away she'd said.

But he was losing.

Like father like son, Sammy was bristling for revenge, bit by the same bug and willing to sacrifice anything in its name. 

So he was losing. 

His father, his brother, the family he'd fought to protect the whole of his life from the danger they indiscriminately sought without regard to the life they'd take in their success.

He was losing, because peace at the price of all that, was a peace he could do without.


	23. S2-Coda: 'In My Time of Dying'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys finally come together in grief.

Dean smelled of ash, and Sam of tears—fitting remains for John Winchester. Salted and burned.

In the aftermath of silence (they knew it was no solution, but it would dull the pain), their union was desperate, sweat-slick skin sticking and sliding over leather. Teeth, tongues, more tears. Blood from wounds reopened by clawing, frantic fingers. Hot, hard heat. Stretch and burn. Drag. Fury and fear and grief. Blinding. Driving. Pounding. It had never been like this before. Wasn’t what they'd imagined. 

Next time—if there was one—would be better.

Or maybe never this good again.


	24. Coda: 'Everybody Loves A Clown'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean grieves.

Sam listened from the shadows to his brother scream without ever saying a word. In each crash and crack of steel on steel, Sam could hear his anguished cries,

_You son of a bitch, how could you!_

The sound of shattered glass.

_I did everything—EVERYTHING—for this family, and you deserted me!_

Crowbar strike to the trunk.

_What am I supposed to do? WHAT!_

And again.

_Goddamn you for leaving me behind!_

The sound of metal tearing.

_What the hell am I supposed to do, now? What the hell do I DO!_

Sam bowed his head and cried the tears his brother couldn't find.


	25. Coda: 'Bloodlust'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Right and privilege.

'Sammy,' Dean said from the next bed.

'Huh-mph,' Sam groaned sleepily into his pillow.

'Just testin',' Dean said.

Sam lifted his head, squinting in the darkness. 'Huh?' 

Dean was quiet for long enough that Sam thought he'd drifted to sleep, or maybe not really been awake at all. He laid back down.

'You said I was the only one who got to call you that.'

Sam rolled his head to look over at the outline of his brother. He was on his back staring at the ceiling, clearly awake.

'Yeah. I did.'

Sam was nearly asleep again by the time Dean answered,

'Good…that's good.'


	26. Coda: 'Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one left behind.

Sam had thought it would help. He'd thought it was a beginning, but now he wondered if Dean's hot, demanding mouth, sharp teeth, and bruising fingers hadn't been a farewell, a bookend to one part of their life, so the next could begin. 

Dean had not let Sam touch him since the night they set John's pyre ablaze.

His brother was broken. His jagged edges kept cutting at Sam, forcing him to arms length like he was afraid Sam might be poisoned by the guilt he carried. Guilt John laid on him. And Sam knew there was no quantity of dark, sweaty nights, tasting of ash and smelling of sex, that could erase that.


	27. Coda: 'Simon Said'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How do you find what you can't track?

Dean leaned a hip on the rail, back to the warm light and noise inside the Roadhouse, thoughts heavy with Sam's afternoon revelation. He jammed his fists in his pockets and hunched inside his coat, shivered unconsciously. Fall was getting its foot in the door early this year.

'You okay?'

Sam's soft voice behind him. 

He shrugged. 'Not really.'

'Me neither.'

They stood together in the silent chill, Sam with his eyes tipped to the stars above, Dean staring at the dusty ground.

'You afraid now?' Sam asked.

Dean stomped the dirt with the toe of his boot and said nothing.


	28. Inter-scene: 'No Exit'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Careful what you wish for...'cause he already knows.

'Jo, you've got a mother that worries about you. Who wants something more for you. Those are good things. You don't throw things like that away. Might be hard to find later.'

Jo knew the hurt of losing a parent. She'd missed her dad fiercely when the afternoon light slanted just right to block the face of some brawny hunter coming through the Roadhouse door wearing leather like he used to only to be revealed a stranger a moment later.

But the hurt in Dean's eyes ran deeper, and maybe that was because his mother had died without a choice—taken—not given to the dark cause of a Hunter's life with weapon in hand; and the tone of his voice said John may never have been inclined to take notice of his sons' personal aspirations for more than vengeance.

For once, she swallowed her vitriolic retort, and followed him in silence.


	29. Inter-scene: 'The Usual Suspects'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys, this episode was always kind of on my 'blah' list except for that ONE moment when Sam looks so desperate. 
> 
> And does anyone else think Linda Blair could double for Carrie Fisher pretty easily? Maybe they should have given her a call for the _Force Awakens_...

He was too far away.

Even with his long arms, long legs, longer reach and a speed he'd acquired through years of training and experience, Sam couldn't beat a bullet. 

His heart constricted in his chest as Sheridan's finger twitched dangerously on the trigger. Dean stayed frozen on his knees, not willing to provoke anyone so obviously unstable. His eyes flicked to his brother's. If they moved together, just exactly at the right moment… It could be done, they had before. It was something they were amazingly good at. But Dean twitched his head in a quick shake.

No.

Sam bit the inside of his lip, ground his teeth hard, and held his breath against the helplessness.

 


	30. Coda: 'Crossroad Blues'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When the levee breaks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you know if you google 'gun oil' you do NOT get hits on things that would actually clean metallic surfaces? Or maybe that's just me... :)

Sam had had enough.

He thought Dean had put away his guilt. Maybe not dealt with it, but at least wasn't marinating in it. There may be no forgiveness of John's actions for Dean, but Sam had hoped for acceptance.

Turned out it was all still there, only skin deep, and the slightest scrape tore the wound right open. 

Sam would have happily punched Evan in the mouth for setting Dean off his emotional balance again—if he'd ever really reached one—but since that wasn't an option…

'Sammy?' Dean eyed him warily from the next bed, hunched over his Colt and a greased cleaning rag. For half a heartbeat Sam wondered if gun oil could lube other things.

And then he moved to find out.


	31. Inter-scene: 'Croatoan'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The heavy weight of decision.

So, this was it.

Dean laid his gun down, deliberate and slow, Sam's eyes tracking his every move. He wouldn't short change the kid in saying he wouldn't make a dive for it if Dean didn't watch him close.

John's words banged around in his ears between heartbeats, thrumming though him with his rushing blood.

This was it.

Sammy wasn't going to die by a bullet, though. No way. If he was going down, and it was Dean doing it, it was going to be under Dean's hands—warm and alive until the last possible second. 

So this was it.

Wasn't it?


	32. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Hunted'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The moment of no return and promises that can't be kept.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Got another twofer, folks...

The first explosion froze Dean's heart in his chest.

'Hold on. Not yet. Just wait and see,' Gordon whispered.

_No. Nonononono!_

The second explosion rocked the ground, concussion wave pushing itself against the back of Dean's head like a physical force. His vision blurred, went red. Heart, lungs, stomach, all his internal organs lurched for real estate in his throat at the same time. He choked. Sobbed. Tried to scream past the gag in his mouth.

Silence. Nothing but silence. And that was all wrong. Sam Winchester didn't die to the sound of silence. 

Dean choked on another sob.

_Sammy…_

 

****

 

There hadn't been time for touches or kisses or validation of Sam's continued existence right after. Only enough for Dean to haul him up, take in one agonized look at his bruised and bloodied face before Sam was pushing him outside and then they were being chased by Gordon.

There was time now. 

Dean breathed out a stuttering breath across Sam's bare skin. One tear slipped silent and unnoticed down his cheek as he pressed his lips, gentle as a whisper, to the bruise across Sam's flank.

'Never again, Sammy,' he breathed. 'Don't you leave me, again.'

'No, Dean. Never.'


	33. Inter-scene: 'Playthings'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean may have promised, but that wasn't the real issue here.

Dean sat on the edge of the bed for longer than he could admit to himself, fighting down the urge to scream in frustration, swallowing against the sour bile rising up from his knotted stomach. 

He'd said he promised, but it was only so much bullshit to shut Sam up so he would sleep. The kid was strung out, drunk and desperate, and he probably wouldn't remember a thing in the morning.

Dean was never going to keep the promise. He knew that. That wasn't what was making his chest so heavy he could hardly breathe. It was the look of relief in Sam's eyes once he'd extracted Dean's word. 

That he would take care of Sam. Come what may.

 


	34. Coda: 'Nightshifter'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was the perfect opportunity. If he could just convince Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, not one of my favorite eps, but I always really enjoyed the end, the way they integrated that very melancholy song with all the slow-mo, and then the boys faces after they slid into the Impala, only a hairsbreadth away from having gotten caught. It's like they both suddenly and fiercely realized the reality of their situation and just how bad it had gotten.

'Shit.' Dean dropped his forehead to the steering wheel fifty miles south of Milwaukee on a deserted turnoff. 'We are in _deep_.'

'Yeah.' Sam blew out a breath, checked the sideview mirror. 

Dean slid him a look. 'Maybe we should, you know, drop off the grid for a while. Lay low. Out of the way. Grand Canyon's great this time of year.'

Sam faced forward, eyes flicking to check the mirrors yet again. His mouth was a hard, thin line. Determination was hooked hard between his brows. 

Dean sighed heavily. 'Guess that's a no.' 

He slipped the car into gear and steered her back to the main road. 

It was worth a try anyway.


	35. Coda: 'Houses of the Holy'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A nip of whisky and a little white lie to help Sammy sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was really only on this last time through this ep that I realized how hurt Dean would be having to watch Sam lose what faith he'd been able to cobble together, and knowing Dean as we now do, how he might very well have lied to Sam about what he felt when he saw that guy die just to try and help Sam hold on a little longer. Always the big brother, Dean...

Sam turned in Dean's embrace, sighed and settled deeper into sleep. It had been a while since he'd slept a full night, peaceful, without nightmares. 

So what if it took a lie to bring him that?

It had hurt to watch the kid's faith crumble right in front of him. Sam had so little left, Dean couldn't see how it was fair to take that, too. It hadn't cost him anything to spin his story away from poor, dumb luck and reshape it to the hand of God. 

There was a sad kind of justice in it, really.

'Ain't no angels watchin' out for nobody, Mom,' Dean whispered. 'There's just me.'


	36. Inter-scene: 'Born Under a Bad Sign'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meg let Sam remember _some_ things.

_Don't you FUCKING do this to him!_

Hush, Sammy. Hush… You know it has to be this way. You _asked_ him to do this. Made him promise. I'm just facilitating.

_No! No. This is NOT how it happens!_

Not too many choices, Sammy. This is what you wanted. Don't let little bro go Dark Side of the Moon.

_Not this way! This'll kill him. KILL him!_

I know, Sammy. I know. Won't it, though? Especially after he discovers it was me all along?

_I'm gonna hunt you to the ends of HELL!_

You can try, Sammy-boy.

_It's SAM, you bitch._


	37. Coda: 'Tall Tales'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If they can be mislead this easily, what could the consequences be later?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I actually like 'Bugs' better than this episode, and that's saying something, so. I was reaching with this. Sorry, folks.

'Okay, so…you boys gonna be all right now?' Bobby asked, eyeing them suspiciously as they sat silent on opposite sides of the bed from each other. 

Sam didn't answer. Dean grunted, 'Yeah, sure. See around, Bobby, and thanks.'

'Anytime, boys.'

The door closed.

'Dean, I meant it—'

'Dude, would you leave it? I know you didn't do anything.'

Sam fell silent, sullen. 

'But it was so easy, Dean. To screw with us, I mean, what if…'

Dean twisted and reached for Sam's wrist across the space, squeezed hard.

'Ain't nothin', Sammy,' Dean said, reading his brother's fear. 'Like you said, too close quarters. When it really counts…'

Sam nodded. 'Yeah. I know.'


	38. Coda: 'Roadkill'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope is in the eye of the beholder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really loved Sam in this episode. He was on an emotional roll with this one and 'Heart'. 
> 
> And you get another twofer :)

Sam watched her dissipate, blend with the rising sun. He had to squint at the last moment, and her form was gone before he could blink. 

'You think she's really going to a better place?'

'I hope so.'

He had to believe it. If he didn't—if _they_ didn't—what was the point of what they did? If the dark of the void was all that waited, what did that make them—obliterating the little existence to which these poor souls had managed to cling? 

It made them murderers.

Sam shivered in the chill breeze, felt the dark in his veins tremble at the thought.

 

_Hope's kinda the whole point, Dean._

 

Dean squirmed in his seat, glanced right to see Sam slumped against the window, puffs of fog across the glass where he breathed even in his sleep.

_Hope is the thing with feathers…_

The words popped into Dean's head and he scowled, trying to recall where he'd heard it. Probably Sammy quoting something in his school days. Dean didn't even know what it meant really. 

What he did know, was that hope was a dangerous thing. Fickle, and often futile. Too often. 

Dean didn't hope anymore. He'd been caught at the pointy end way too many times.

'Feathers my ass,' he murmured. 'Try razor blades.'

 


	39. Coda: 'Heart'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean doesn't wear grey well, and Sam doesn't know the capacity of his own heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another near the top of my favs list, and you get another twofer. YAY.

Dean flinched like the shot had gone through his own heart.

His brother had killed before. Before the age of fifteen he had a string of kills under his belt that any warrior coming of age in a bygone era would envy; but they killed from a distance. It might be point blank range with a .45 or a silver dagger, but their hearts were never involved.

Sam had argued with his conscience over the years, sure, but Dean knew evil and monsters were mostly black and white.

Until now.

Things were looking awfully fucking grey right now.

 

 

‘I didn’t love her.’

‘Sam, don’t…’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Don’t do this to yourself, man. It ain’t how to deal with shit like this.’

‘You do.’

‘Yeah, well—.’

‘I didn’t love her. I don’t know what— Look I just don’t want you to think…’

‘Sammy, you got a heart big enough to fit the whole world. You think I raised you not knowin’ that?’

‘But I—.’

‘Sam. This? What we got goin’ here? This is above and beyond and outside…everything. And it—it ain’t never gonna come to nothin’, Sam. You know that. It can’t. Can’t be enough for either of us.’

‘Yeah, I—I know.’


	40. Inter-scene: 'Hollywood Babylon'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam sees something from his brother that he hasn't in a while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Want an episode worse than 'Bugs'? Here it is. I broke the word count on this one folks, 'cause frankly, I had to dig deep for this. It didn't really help that there was a lot of meta going on in this episode, and that doesn't play house well with my project.

Sam folded his arms and leaned, sullen, against the stair rail as Dean went charging off at the beck and call of the voices over his headset, plate of Taquitos still in his hand.

Sam hurt. Down to his bones he hurt, and he was fucking tired. Exhausted. He couldn't close his eyes but to see Madison there, tearful gaze pleading—forgiving—and it pissed him off to see Dean just fall in step like she hadn't even happened and blend in with all this—this glitz and fame and frippery.

 _But he's happy_ , some tiny, grudging part of him observed. He's happy and well fed and smiling and actually enjoying himself. _When was the last time you saw that?_

Well, the hotspot vacation he'd planned it might not be, but Dean had found a way to have fun anyway. He was good at that, Sam remembered. Somehow making the best of everything. Usually for Sam's benefit. 

He sighed heavily and unfolded from his spot to trail belatedly after his brother and see if he could score a copy of those 'dailies' he'd been hearing about from the crew, to help in their investigation.


	41. Inter-scene: 'Folsom Prison Blues'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes Dean doesn't think before he acts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, Johnny's song was a helluva lot better...

_We may not be saints, but we're loyal and we pay our debts._

It was a side of his brother Sam didn't see often. It strongly resembled John, and that sat wrong in Sam's craw, but at the same time it made him proud…and a little guilty.

_That means something to me, and it ought to you._

Sam had never felt, nor even understood, the blind devotion Dean possessed, the loyalty that ran through to his bones when it came to John and his cause. He'd questioned it, berated his brother for it, run away from it himself in the end. 

_We do this job wherever it takes us._

It's what made his brother strong, Sam figured, in the end. Dean saw things in black and white and if it wasn't evil, it deserved to be saved from evil…even if it was bad. Sam felt a little hollow at the lack of that same conviction, wished again that his world weren't washed out in so many shades of grey.

 

 

_Dean, you stupid, STUPID, goddamn fool!_

Sam's heart slammed against his ribs as hard as Dean slammed Lucas up against the pillar. It wasn't that Dean couldn't take care of himself. Dean had fought things faster, stronger, and bigger than humans since he was twelve and always come out on the winning side, or he wouldn't be standing here. It wasn't for Dean's safety that Sam's heart was doing an energetic Samba. It was for his own. 

He could take care of himself, too, make no mistake, but it was because of him Dean had even stepped into this. He didn't like this plan, hadn't liked it from the beginning. Now, with Dean being frogmarched away to solitary, and dark, calculating eyes sizing him up from every angle, he liked it even less.


	42. Coda: 'What Is and What Should Never Be'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: Mature

'But I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay so bad.'

It was on the tip of Sam's tongue to ask, 'Then why didn't you?' but the answer Dean gave would have worn the guise of duty and loyalty and whether or not Sam used those very words as a consolation, it wasn't the answer he wanted.

His answer came later, unasked for, in the darkness where Dean splayed his hands wide against Sam's back and pressed his wet cheek into the hollow of his spine and split Sam open wide on his throbbing cock and told him with his silence how any world or dream or wish where _this_ was not true between them was not a place Dean ever wanted to be.


	43. Coda: 'All Hell Breaks Loose' pt 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Without Sam, there was nothing.

_Now I lay me down to sleep…_

 

Sam dropped into the mud with a wet squelch, and Dean felt his heart fall with him, ground into the muck beneath his knees.

 

_I pray the Lord my soul to keep…_

 

Hold on, hold on, hold on. It was a plea and a command, all Dean could think as he went down in front of Sam, arms going around him, to hold him up, to hold him here, to hold him alive. 

 

_If I should die before I wake…_

 

Sam's head lolled in Dean's hands, life flickering erratically in his eyes, recognition of this world already gone as Dean cradled his face and spoke softly.

 

_I pray the Lord my soul to take._

 

Sam's last breath didn't go with a shudder or a fight or even a sound. It went in silence, taken without resistance, down to darkness and to death where Dean was powerless to follow. 

 

And that's how the world ended.


	44. Inter-scene: 'All Hell Breaks Loose' pt 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't decide, so...threefer?

It was a slippery slope, Sam had told them, warned them with his own mouth, his own words. Giving into the darkness inside could only lead to places worse than Hell, make them into monsters worse than the thing that created them. 

But Jake deserved to die. _Needed_ to die. It had to end here. Now.

'Please…don't. Please.'

He was choking on his own blood anyway. It would be a mercy. 

Sam pulled the trigger three more times, quick succession, blood spattering across his face; and deep inside him in the dark something uncoiled, flexed, and swelled in satisfaction.

 

 

'How certain are you that what you brought back, is 100%, pure, Sam?'

Yellow Eyes leered and Dean forced his gaze not to skitter over the demon's shoulder, to look at Sam, to remember the hideous curling snarl on his lips, the dark satisfaction in his eyes, as he emptied his clip into Jake. The kid had to go down, that wasn't in dispute, but the malice in Sam's face, even when the kid begged, was something Dean had never seen before.

Doubt wound around his heart with cold, bony fingers and squeezed fear into his blood and unbidden came the thought,

_What have I done?_

 

 

Sam thought there was no hurt sharper than Dean's admission to the demon deal that brought him back from the dead. He was wholly unprepared for the childlike confusion in his brother's eyes, the amazement, when he turned the tables and offered up his own fealty in equal measure.

'There is _nothing_ I wouldn't do for you.'

It cracked Sam's heart more easily than a dry chrysalis under the touch of a reckless child to see Dean squint, baffled and uncertain, grappling to understand how his love could be returned freely and fully; and Sam understood, perhaps for the first time, how little his brother believed himself worthy of love, of sacrifice, of life itself. 

The realization brought with it a knowledge that, until now, he had never known true pain.


	45. S3-Inter-scene: 'The Magnificent Seven'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam can read his brother like a book. And it hurts.

     Flush with candlelight, Dean's skin was marked in gold and shadow. Were it not for the pall of terror about him, Sam would have lusted for such a tableau as Dean cut with his gun across his knee, thighs spread, and eyes dark with the promise of danger.  


     But if there was one iota of good come from the tainted blood in his veins, it was that he could sense the fear between them, thick and choking like ashen plumes of poisonous gas belched from the bowels of the Earth herself . And like he would against such a force of nature, Sam felt impotent before the fate Dean had brought upon them both.


	46. Coda: 'The Kids Are All Right'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam accused his brother of being selfish, but sometimes he couldn't believe the size of Dean's heart.

'I was thinkin’, Sam…what if…?’

'He’s yours, isn’t he?’

'…no, actually. He’s not. But for a minute, though, when I thought he was—’

‘Dean, I'm getting you out of this. I swear. And you can go back and—’

‘Sam that’s not the point.’

‘What then?’

‘It felt good, you know? To know there was a piece of me going to survive.’

‘…yeah.’

‘So that you could…lay a claim, I guess.'

‘What?’

‘He'd be blood. Family. You wouldn't be alone, Sammy.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dean…’

‘I'm sorry, Sam. I really am. You weren’t wrong. I was selfish. I wish…I wish I could’ve at least given you this.’


	47. Inter-scene: 'Sin City'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hell may not be what Dean's imagined.

Even the demons didn't like Hell. It wasn't something he had ever really considered, and it made his bones chilly to think of it. He’d imagined it, sure—kind of psyching himself up for the trip—but he'd always thought of it like a demon Woodstock. After all, demons were born in Hell. Why wouldn't they like home?

To hear Casey say topside was Eden for her kind, brought a whole new level to the playing field, and made Dean wonder if all his ‘preparations’ were just fantasy pipe dreams. And the look in her eyes…so close to pity.

When the devils may care, it was time to be afraid. 


	48. Coda: 'Bad Day at Black Rock'

‘They think I opened it, Dean.’

Dean hummed distractedly and plucked carefully at the trip wire he'd just finished re-stringing across the doors of John’s lock-up. ‘That oughta do it. You got the shotgun reloaded?’

‘Dean.’ 

Dean stood and brushed off his jeans, took the gun from Sam’s hands, aimed it with careful concentration, and set the trigger. ‘Well, they're wrong. And who’s going to believe Gordon anyway? He's a freak.’

‘Most people say the same about me,’ Sam said softly. 

Dean shot him a sharp look, then stepped back to examine his handy work. ‘Well, that's done. Should be safe as houses again. Any of this stuff you wanna take with you, Sam? I got most of the ammo in the trunk already.’

Sam fingered the soccer trophy for a moment. It felt good to know John had thought enough to keep it. It made him sad, too, that he had to find his father’s pride in him sitting here in the dark and dust, that John couldn't have said something while he was alive. 

He set the trophy back up high on the shelf. It didn't matter anymore anyway. That boy was long gone, lost somewhere before Sam even left for Stanford, probably before he'd ever won that trophy. If he was honest, he might never have existed at all except in a wild, fleeting fantasy. 

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. Let's get outta here.’


	49. Coda: 'Bedtime Stories'

_Aren't you tired of cleaning up Dean's messes? Of dealing with that broken psyche of his? No more desperate, sloppy, needy Dean. You can finally ... be free._

It hurt just to hear the words. They were like tree branches on wet glass in his brain. 

Most people would say it was because there was a grain of truth to them. Maybe there was, but not in the way the demon thought. Dean was all those things: a broken, needy, desperate, sloppy mess that Sam had been following around all of his life, but he didn't know how to live out from under the shadow of his big brother. Even if it was annoying and drove him nearly insane some days, that shadow also meant love, and it meant protection, and Sam couldn't do without those things.

He'd tried once and found that freedom weighed a lot more than he’d thought. 


	50. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Red Sky At Morning'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Twofer.

She hadn't expected the hot flush of desire when he'd come down the stairs, somehow making the last minute rent-a-tux look custom tailored to perfection, and found herself almost serious when she offered,

'You know when this is over, we should really have angry sex.'

And after her—second? third? oh well, she'd lost count—betrayal, she certainly didn't expect his hands on her, holding her, tense with desperation. A desperation to save her. She didn't deserve to be saved, for so many reasons, but certainly not by these two. 

She wouldn't have returned the favor, and for the first time in her life, that knowledge left her feeling a little hollow.

 

'You understand, don't you?' Sam whispered. 'Why I need you to care?'

Dean stayed quiet, stroking a hand along Sam's back.

'I need to know you want this…that this isn't your light at the end of the tunnel. Because I thought you couldn't be alone. I thought you needed me, and this—this act of yours…' Sam's voice broke. 'It's like you'll be glad to escape.'

Dean sighed. 'This isn't about how I feel about you, Sam. Or maybe it is. Because the harder you try to save me, the more pointless you make what I did for you.' Sam started under his hand, but Dean held him tight and continued. 'It's one or the other of us, Sammy, that's the deal, and I chose you.' He cupped the back of Sam's neck in his palm, squeezed gently. 'You know how to walk your own path. You proved it. I may need you, but you don't need me.'

Sam said nothing more and cried himself to sleep against Dean's shoulder.


	51. Coda: 'Fresh Blood'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean's never going to stop being the big brother, and Sam isn't going to stop trying to get him out of his deal...even if his ideas are a little unconventional sometimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It occurred to me watching this, that Sam cutting off Gordon's head with razor wire was probably a risky proposition since they were both bleeding, and I just had to do something with that.

They didn't even get out of the building before Dean was fuming, let down from the adrenaline rush leaving him boiling angry. He shoved Sam into the passenger seat and dropped the med-kit into the footwell. 

'Razor wire? Really, Sammy? What the hell!'

Sam stared at his hands as Dean poured Holy Water (not that it would help) and whisky over the somewhat more than shallow slices in his palms.

'It's all my blood, Dean. It's okay.'

'Hell, it's okay! We don't know that. How could you be so damn reckless?'

Sam stared at him, the barest smirk ghosting at the corner of his mouth. Dean grunted irritably and poured more Holy water over his hands. 

'You vamp out on me, and I will shoot your ass,' Dean muttered. 

Sam reached to finger the mark of Gordon's bite at Dean's throat. He hummed a little wistfully. 'You know, if you couldn't die…'

Dean's gaze snapped up, sharp and startled. Sam shrugged and held his hands out for his brother to wrap with gauze and tape.


	52. Coda: 'A Very Supernatural Christmas'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Dean wanted to know what changed Sam's mind, all he had to do was remember.

Sam stood before his handiwork and felt unaccountably lost.

The scraggly evergreen across the parking lot had yielded a branch for the tree, and along with a rainwater bucket from behind the hotel's utility shed and a stand of stolen lights from the fence of a house down the block, he'd managed to cobble together something resembling his memory. He'd grabbed eggnog and rum and the cheap paper banner at the gas station across the street. 

It was the least he could do. Dean had tried so hard for him. Sam could return the favor.

It wasn't Dean's fault Sam was mired in his his own fury over this whole thing, while Dean had moved on to accept it, whether or not Sam believed the sincerity of that acceptance. Dean had made the choice, so it was easy for him to accept. Sam still had to catch up, though that wasn't likely to happen, and he didn't intend on it even being necessary. He clung to that as he taped the banner up and poured the eggnog.

He was going to do everything possible to be sure this wasn't his brother's last Christmas.


	53. Coda: 'Malleus Maleficarum'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fallout.

'Dean, you okay?'

Dean glanced over his shoulder, out the window, where Ruby had stood a minute ago, drenched in harsh neon light. Sam was looking at him with his patent mix of worried relief, hands twitching at his sides, and all Dean could do was look at him.

_There's no way of saving me from the Pit, is there?_

'Dean?'

Sam took a step closer, and then another, brow pulling further down by increments with each one.

_Look at you. Trying to be all stoic. My God, it's heartbreaking._

Dean kept right on looking, because the world had changed color somehow, and Sam was all the brighter for it suddenly. He took a shuddering breath and crossed the room, met Sam halfway, and leaned up and kissed him.

'Dean?' Sam was startled, wide-eyed. 

Dean shook his head. 'Not now, Sammy.' He dragged Sam down on the bed and tumbled after him and threw stoic out the window.


	54. Coda: 'Dream a Little Dream of Me'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dreams aren't real, and demons lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I loved the doppelgänger scene for Dean's confession of always being the one to take care of Sam and be there when he was needed, but I didn't like the fact that John got seriously shafted in this. He died to bring his son back to life. How much more can you a love a person? I get this was an exercise in Dean's inner-self, but that part wasn't fair to John. So, this is my fix-it.

Dean stared into the mirror and blinked.

No shiny black.

He blinked again just to be sure.

It was a dream. Just a dream, and not even his own. That Jeremy kid had been rooting around in his head. The things he said…they weren't true. Well, not really. Sure, John had thrown a lot of shit on him as a kid, but it wasn't like he had a choice. Dean didn't blame him. He didn't. He couldn't. 

Maybe Dean was a soldier, a grunt. He knew his place, after all. Highest and best use and all. But it hadn't made him less in John's eyes. The man had died for him. The pain of that was proof enough against the lies his doppelgänger had spewed. 

'It was just a dream.'

Dean blew out a breath and slapped off the lights.

He refused to look back at his reflection in the dark.


	55. Coda: 'Mystery Spot'

‘Dude, it was clowns,’ Dean said a hundred and ten miles into the silence. ‘Had to be, or you wouldn’t be this freaked.’

'…yeah,’ Sam sighed and laid his head back. ‘Yeah, it was.’

Dean scowled and turned back to the road. 

When they stopped for the night, Sam went into the office with Dean to get their room and wouldn't let him go on the food run alone. He sat on the end of the bed, knee bouncing, staring at the bathroom door waiting for Dean to finish his shower. He tried to sleep in his own bed, stared up the ceiling, body locked up in terror that the breathing beside him would suddenly stop. 

Then there was a hand in his hair, sliding down the nape of his neck, across his chest, urging him over in the bed, and Dean slid in beside him and wrapped him up. 

'I'm here, Sammy. ‘M here.’


	56. Coda: 'Jus In Bello'

It was probably the single biggest failure they'd ever had. 

Correction. He’d ever had. Sam was willing to follow Ruby’s advice, sacrifice that poor girl. One to save a few dozen. And the way things turned out? Yeah, it was the better way to go. Hind sight being twenty-twenty and all that. 

But Dean couldn't ascribe to that methodology, and he was beginning to know what Sam must have felt like the year before Yellow Eyes’ showdown at Cold Oak. Sacrificing even one soul, was one too many. So, he'd gone on a crusade for Nancy, lost sight of the bigger picture, because no one was dying for them, not on his watch. 

Turned out his watch didn't reach far enough, and now he was drowning in blood.


	57. Coda: 'Ghostfacers'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What will be left behind, when he's gone?

_Are you all right?_

Ed had asked in hopes the emotional impact of their cobbled footage had been what made Dean swipe at his eyes at the end.

But Dean didn’t give a damn about Ed or Harry or even Corbett—damn dumb naive kid that he was. He wouldn't admit to tearing up, not to anybody, and sure as hell not over the idea that some group of ignorant nerds who still lived in their mother’s basement had lost one of their own, when Dean and Sam had lost so much more.

Were going to lose so much more.

_Earlier, you and Sam -- he said you had two months left? Is it cancer?_

If only.

It was him and Sam on that screen, doing what they did best—saving people, hunting things. But it wouldn't be, a couple of months from now. It would be just Sam then, and the only proof that they had existed, that they had been the amazing team and underdog heroes that they were, had just been erased.

No, he was not all right.


	58. Coda: 'Long Distance Call'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hope. Faith. In the end, they were really the same thing.

Hope was a sucker punch to the gut. Dean knew that. Thought he’d taught Sam that. But here the kid was, hanging onto it like it'd be the thing to save him in the end. And who was Dean, really, to take that from him? He was ready to kill an innocent man because he had faith in the voice on the other end of the phone line. Dad’s voice. So Dad was his hope, and wasn’t that the ultimate sign of a desperate man—that he expected John to save him from beyond the grave. Well, the man had done it once. No reason he couldn’t make an encore performance. 

Sam rolled in his sleep, hand drifting across Dean’s torso and curling firmly at his hipbone. 

And me, Sammy had said. 

Dean tightened his fingers in the mess of silken waves threaded between them. 

If he was going to hope, if he was going to have faith, then he didn’t need to look very far. It was right beside him. It always had been.


	59. Coda: 'Time Is On My Side'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean considers the ramifications of immortality.

'Immortality, huh?'

'…yeah.'

'You know, I don't think hellhounds give a shit if you're immortal. They'll just take their time chewing you into smaller pieces.'

'Yeah? Well, I guess we'll never know.'

'Sammy…'

'Really, Dean? It was our best shot. But you had to 'be the bigger man,' didn't you?'

'…ain't about that.'

'Really? Then what!'

'Forever's a long time, Sammy.'

'Yeah, so?'

'Think you would have stuck around for all of it?'

'What?'

''Cause I can't see as how it would have been worth seeing the end of all things, if you weren't standin' right beside me, Sam.'

'…Dean…'


	60. Coda: 'No Rest for the Wicked'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An epitaph for Dean Winchester.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I totally blew the 100 word count, but it's the death of freakin' Dean Winchester. Cut me some slack.
> 
> And eternal thanks to my lovely lady Linden for her wealth of knowledge in the Classics to have researched and found me the lovely morsel herein that Sam is chanting in his grief. (She wrote it in FREAKIN' GREEK for me. By hand. And texted it to me. So I could painstakingly pick it out on my keyboard. This is a masterpiece people, really :D )

He sat. For a very long time, he sat and breathed the humid scent of his brother’s blood on his hands, and clothes, and pooled on the floor. 

 

‘ζωσάν σ έφίλουν, καί νύν σ’έτι …’

_As long as I have lived I have loved you,_

 

At some point, Bobby’s hands on his shoulders convinced him to rise and heft the deadweight of his brother’s body, carry it out of the house, into the night. 

 

‘τιμώ ούσαν καί κατά γής, καί…’

_and though you are now beneath the earth,_

 

Sam didn't know what he was looking for until he found it. A copse of tall trees off a backroad in Illinois. Two fallen limbs could serve as a marker in the center of the clearing. This was the spot. 

 

‘τιμήσω σε άρχι. οίδα δέ σοί…’

_I honor you still--and will for as long as I live._

 

The earth was unforgiving, like it was voicing its own denial that Dean Winchester could be dead, refusing to part and take his body in. It did finally, enveloped the long, narrow box Bobby turned up that looked like it may have once served as a munitions shipping crate. Fitting, that. 

 

‘ότι καί κατά γής, εϊπερ…’

_And I know that even below the earth,_

 

He got the lid closed, got the box in the hole, but his body locked up at his attempts to shovel in the dirt. That's when the tears started. Not the sad, grief stricken, anguished ones. No, these were desperate and furious and hot with the need for vengeance. 

 

‘χρηστοίς γέρας έστίν, πρώτει

σοί τιμαί κείνται.’

_if there is indeed a reward for the worthy ones,_

_the first and foremost shall be yours._

 

In the end, Bobby did the deed, shoveling the dirt in slow, respectfully if such could be said of the act. When the earth was tamped and the marker pounded in at the head of the grave, he leaned on the shovel, curious, and asked,

‘What’s that you've been saying, Sam?’ Sam looked up, face blank. ‘That prayer you been chanting ever since last night. What is it?’

Sam gave a tiny shake of his head, startled that the words had been passing his lips aloud all this time. 

‘Greek. Epitaph. I heard it once…a long time ago.’

In another lifetime, where the sun shined, and the future was the color of corn silk and green eyes, and his brother was only a phone call away. 

‘’S nice. Fitting,’ Bobby said quietly, and when Sam made no move to answer or follow, he left the boy on his knees by the fresh mound of earth, still murmuring under his breath.


	61. S4-Inter-scene: 'Lazarus Rising'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam had learned to survive.

Sam hadn't learned to live without Dean. 

He wasn't even sure he had accepted it, but he had carved out a place for the emptiness to sit, ever vigilant for the unguarded moments when a stray sound or smell might bring a memory surging to the surface, so that at least he could function from day to day. He had learned not to look too hard at anyone lest he catch sight of a broad shouldered back, or spiky brown hair, or flashing green eyes. 

He had learned to survive, to exist. 

And then it all came crashing down. 

'Heya, Sammy.’


	62. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Are You There God? It's Me, Dean Winchester.'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A collection of thoughts...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some serious indecision going on here, folks, so you get a four-fer. (I think that's my personal best, so far :))

The boy was ruined, and goddamn John Winchester and the Life for doing it to him. Despite John’s reliance on him and nearly single-handedly raising Sam, or being one of the best damn Hunters out there with more kills under his belt at thirty than most men twice his age, Dean still couldn’t find his own self-worth even with God’s branded proof of it writ in his flesh. 

And it killed Bobby inside to see the boy he'd always considered a son look out with those lost, confused, little boy eyes and ask why any angel or God would think enough of him to save his soul. 

***

He'd lost his brother.

He didn't want to admit it, but there was no denying some part of Dean had not come back. The way he walked by Olivia’s body like it was nothing, staring down into the grisly mess of her exploded ribcage like it was no more than some cheap Halloween horror house prop. Sam gagged at the smell, and the blood, and the idea that this had been a living, breathing person only a few hours ago, and Dean would have, too. Before. 

Now his face was blank and his gaze jaded and distant, and Sam knew without a doubt Hell had seen his brother knee deep in blood and bone and ravaged flesh, and Dean remembered it all.

***

It had been two thousand years since he'd worn skin, or tried to contain himself in something so fragile as this human body. He'd forgotten how to touch things, that he even could without destroying them; had forgotten how it felt to want to.

Dean Winchester was brash, arrogant, and belligerent, but he was also determined, fiercely independent, and courageous. Castiel was reminded in the juxtaposition, of his Father's magnificent purpose in creating humans, and how they were his crowning achievement even beyond the perfection of all his angels. 

Castiel had been privileged to touch that, to take hold of it, and draw it from the flames of Hell. His own handprint was emblazoned in the flesh of this man's body as proof, and Castiel yearned to touch him again, to know the majesty of his Father's work firsthand and feel the brilliance of this human's soul fill the vastness of his being.

***

Dean had fought demons and monsters since he was twelve years old, and he wasn't afraid of a damn one of them, not beyond the healthy margin that kept him alive in a fight. 

But now there were angels, and this one who had branded him, whose presence drew him like he had been drawn from the Pit—there was a vastness in those sharp blue eyes that froze Dean to the marrow of his bones, spoke of power beyond his comprehension, a purpose beyond his imagining. What could one man mean in the face of that?

And yet.

_I am the one who gripped you tight, and raised you from perdition._

 


	63. Inter-scene: 'In the Beginning'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Looking at her now, Dean could finally understand.

_I wanna be safe._

Dean’s heart ached at the words, remembering his baby brother’s simple wish, just to have a safe and normal life. Dean had chided him for it, teased and berated him, asked him how he could want more than the open road and the security of his family at his back. 

But it was in his blood to want it, and Dean could see how much, looking at her now—the little pull between her brows, the way her lips pressed and turned down at the corners in her distress. Sam was dark like John with most of his defining physical characteristics, height not withstanding, but his personality—his heart—was all Mary. 

Dean had failed Sam, in so many ways, but this was his redeeming chance. Here and now, if he could turn the tide of the past, he could save their future. 


	64. Coda: 'Metamorphosis'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the brother moments in this episode were just too good to try and expound upon, and the way Dean kept defending Sam to Travis, even when he was angry with him himself and didn't agree? I couldn't mess with that either, so here go. You get a nice little piece of darkness that's probably more foreshadowing than is strictly cannon.

They had lied to each other from the moment they reunited.

_You didn’t want me going down that road, so I didn't go down that road._

_I don't remember a damn thing._

They were unraveling now in knotted, gnarling threads that would be unfit for weaving anything like the truth.

‘There's brimstone and hellfire in your dreams, Dean,’ Sam whispered roughly, nipping at the join of his brother’s jaw and neck. ‘Tell me what you remember.’

Dean clawed at Sam’s thigh, hissed sharply at the teeth scraping across his throat. ‘Stay out of my fucking head, little brother.’

‘Told you…my power only works with demons,’ Sam gasped when Dean finally released his mouth from a brutal kiss.

Dean drew back to stare at him, and in the midnight light Sam thought his brother's eyes flashed darkly as he whispered, 

'That's why I said to stay out.'


	65. Coda: 'Monster Movie'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How long had Dean been covering the darkness within, and how much longer could it last?

Sam slept as they crossed the Ohio-Indiana state line, and Dean stared down the backside of midnight and thought about what he'd said to Jamie.

_It's kinda of like a mission…a mission from God._

He hadn't meant to open up like that, wasn't even sure what he meant by it at the time, but he thought about it now, asked himself if he believed it. He had an angel on his shoulder and God’s orders in his pocket, and he’d been cramming down the nightmares for weeks telling himself they’d stop with enough time. 

He glanced across to Sam, felt a heavy lump settle in the pit of his stomach. He didn't find what he’d expected in Sam when he came back, couldn't reconcile with the psychic powers and demon sidekick, couldn't find the place he'd once belonged by his brother’s side. So, if there was a _mission from God,_ it was only so much horseshit he was selling himself to cover the emptiness inside that was growing with every hell-made memory that resurfaced, and no angel was going to be able to save him from that. 


	66. Coda: 'Yellow Fever'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam knows his brother better than anyone, or he did. Now, he's not so sure anymore.

‘Howler monkeys. Whole room full of them. Those things creep the hell out of me.’

Sam watched the corners of Dean’s eyes, the tell-tale tightening that anyone else would blame on the glare of the sun, but Sam saw for what it was: a truth hidden. ‘Right.’

‘No, just the usual stuff, Sammy. Nothin’ I couldn't handle.’

The thing Sam didn't know was what was hidden behind the tight squint. Once, he would have known, could have goaded Dean into telling, now he couldn't even guess. Ever since he’d come back, Dean had held himself close, and even when Sam was buried balls deep in him, as close as he could ever be to the core of him, there was still a sheet of glass, opaque and thick and cold, impenetrable, that Sam could not breach. 

His brother was standing right beside him, but he felt like a stranger.


	67. Coda: 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean was surprised Sam had any faith left to salvage.

‘…you still pray, Sammy?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

‘Huh.’

‘What?’

‘I don't know, just…little odd, you know? _You_ prayin’.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Don't get your panties in a bunch. It just surprises me, after everything you've been through—demon blood, the psychic stuff, me goin’ to hell. Kinda thought it’d ruin your taste for it.’

‘It's actually made my faith stronger, Dean.’

‘How's that?’

‘All that bad? It's gotta have something to balance it out, right?’

‘Well, I don't see God comin’ to the rescue. Just a couple of dick angels.’

‘No, but that doesn't mean he’s not there, and like you said, I can't let a couple of bad apples ruin the barrel.’

‘…no, no I guess not.’


	68. Inter-Scene: 'Wishful Thinking'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hell is seeping through.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I am harping on Dean remembering Hell. Want to know why? Because I still to this day think the show did a shit job of dealing with the damage and trauma he sustained. (no, no I'm not even a little bitter about that, not at all...)

_Dean! Wake up!_

At first the words didn't sink in, he'd spent too many goddamn hours on the rack tortured by the sound of Sammy’s voice in his ear, so close, believing that he might actually be able to save him. He didn't trust it anymore. 

_Dean! Wake up!_

They came again, and there was an irritated edge in the tone that Sam got only when he was truly afraid, that no demon had been able to mimic in thirty years. It snapped his eyes open. For one spilt and horrifying second, there was only red in his vision, blood in his eyes, a cold black weight in his chest that held him down as surely as if it had impaled him to the bed, and fiery lines of pain tracing every vein and nerve through every limb.

Then it was gone. 

There was light and the softness of the thousand–times–washed comforter beneath him that still smelled somehow stale but could have been roses for him because it was a million fold improvement on the stench of fear and shit and guts spilled out over his hands, threaded through his clawed ripping fingers, sloppy and wet, dripping…

He rolled up, gagging, grabbing for the bottle on the floor that had mysteriously appeared in the last few days as his ineffectual seals on his time in the Pit began to crumble and crack, and he tried to ignore the panic edged disapproval of Sam’s gaze across his shoulder blades. 


	69. Inter-scene: 'I Know What You Did Last Summer'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean was losing his battles, and if he wasn't careful, he'd lose the war, too.

It gnawed deep in his gut like a sharp toothed animal, like one of Alistair's many more inventive tortures. _What she said to me... Dean, it's what you would have said._ He knew he should be grateful, but what right did she have? To touch him, to speak to him…to take Dean's place at his side. 

She hunted with him, fought with him, tutored and taught him--things Dean didn't approve of. She was unearthing the rough edged weapon whose creation John had begun years ago and Dean had painstakingly counterbalanced with all the love their father couldn't spare, and she was honing it into something dark and cold and lethal.

He should thank her for keeping his baby brother alive, for making his sacrifice something more than in vain, but the words were too sour to bring up, even to spit at her. So he danced around them with his usual left-footed grace and avoided her gaze and kept his body between her and Sam with a stranger looking on, and swore she was going to get no more pieces of his little brother.


	70. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Heaven and Hell'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In two thousand years, he has never wanted so much to reach out and touch.
> 
> Sam gets a glimpse, but he'll never see the whole picture.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was one of the perfect episodes, and I just didn't really dare touch most of the scenes, especially the last where I so wanted to, but Jensen sent that one sailing out of the park, so I went into left field instead to find me something else entirely.
> 
> Happy twofer!

Forgiveness is divine.

Humans had derived the phrase from their biblical works inspired by his Father’s hand. Perhaps it was true. He did not know. He could not 'know the feeling' as Ana had put it. But he had learned in his many millennia among humans, to identify emotions, even to emulate them. 

True forgiveness was rare, but Ana offered it freely. Her last act as a human being. 

And Castiel wondered at the source and meaning of the hot, sharp pain behind his breastbone. Correction, his vessel’s breastbone. Something of the man he possessed was perhaps recognizing the intimacy with which Ana pressed a gentle kiss to Dean's mouth, the way Dean held so still, eyes closed against the reality he had created as if the act alone could hold at bay the coming meting out of celestial justice.

Castiel watched in wonder––yes, that was one emotion afforded an angel––felt his fingertips twitch and tingle with unfamiliar and forbidden wanting, to touch, to share in that forgiveness that was so divine it could only truly be bestowed by the least divine of God’s creation.

 

Sam had never felt so fucking helpless.

He had imagined the unholy torture chambers of Hell, had relentlessly and mercilessly fed himself images of the worst horrors his mind could conjure, as penance, perhaps, for his failure to save Dean from his fate; or maybe just a way to stay close to him when he was impossibly far beyond reach. Whatever the reason, however he had drenched his dreams in blood and gore and agony personified in black-eyed, red-eyed, white-eyed bitches of the Pit, it was not even a shade of the reality his brother had suffered. 

He heard Dean’s words, the pain bound up in them, the anguish clawing at their soft underbelly, and knew they were only a gateway, a thread’s breadth crack through which he could peer and try vainly to comprehend the magnitude of tortures his brother had endured.


	71. Coda: 'Family Remains'

‘How’d you fill it, Sammy?’ Dean asked into the dark of the room.

'…fill what?’ Sam yawned, squinting tiredly toward Dean. He was in the other bed tonight, again. Since Ana––since his confession about Hell––he’d barely slept, and when he did it was with his boots on, usually on the other bed, away from Sam. 

_Or are we just pretending it didn't happen?_

Yeah. They pretty much were. 

'Before you…’ Dean stumbled a little. ‘Before you died, you were fighting so hard to save everyone, to fill that darkness in you with something good. To redeem yourself. But after… When I brought you back, you didn't seem to care anymore.’

Sam elbowed up to look at Dean through the close darkness of the room. ‘I guess I just accepted what I was.’

'Just like that? Demon blood boy king of Hell, huh?’

Sam’s teeth clicked together in the silence, but all he said was, ‘You were headed to Hell. I had bigger fish to fry.’ He laid back down and stared up at the ceiling. 

For a long time Dean said nothing. Sam would have thought he was asleep, except he knew better. Dean was avoiding sleep these days unless it was an alcohol induced coma.

'I carved out the hole myself, Sammy.’ Dean’s voice was so soft he could have been talking to himself. ‘I made the choice, and I was––was glad of it. Ain’t no fillin’ it. No redemption for that.’


	72. Inter-scene: 'Criss Angel Is A Douchebag'

Dean was surprised how much it hurt to see the disappointment in Sam’s eyes, like the kid had actually been hanging onto the hope that there was any other way out of this life. 

Bloody or sad.

Dean wasn't sure when exactly he'd come to believe it himself. Maybe he always had. Dad’s bullshit line about finding Yellow Eyes and putting him down so they could quit hunting and go back to a ‘real’ life? Yeah, bullshit. Looking back, he really didn't think he'd ever bought into it, but Sammy…

The kid was looking at him, all hurt puppy eyes with his hands tucked up under his arms, shoulders hunched in like he used to do when he was afraid and afraid to show it. Dean registered suddenly, painfully––like the clean, hot bite of the sharpest of their silver blades slipping between two of his ribs––that after everything, Sam had managed to hang onto that hope for the future.

_Do you think we’ll still be chasing demons when we're sixty?_

And it made his eyes sting (with the damn dust, Dean…just the dust in this dingy hotel room…) to realize Sam believed his future included Dean.


	73. Coda: 'After School Special'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean was a hero. But he was never going to have the things he wanted most.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, of all the things in this episode, this is what I took away. But Dean's eyes just killed me when Amanda called him out at the end, and I had to run with it.

_‘Dean?’_

_‘…yeah.’_

_‘You okay?’_

_‘Yeah. Why?’_

_‘You just…I dunno…seemed in a hurry to leave.’_

_‘Like_ you _wanted to stay?’_

_‘It wasn't so bad––’_

_‘Whatever, dude. Just…shut–up before you wake Dad.’_

_‘…Dean?’_

_‘What.’_

_‘Would you have gone to meet her parents? If we'd stayed?’_

_‘…’_

_‘Dean…?”_

_‘Go to sleep, Sammy.’_

 

‘You all right, Dean?’

‘Huh? Yeah. Fine.’

‘You know her?’

‘What? No. No, ‘course not. I'm not freakin’ Truman High friend–of–the–year’. That was you, man.’

‘I don't know…she looks like…’

‘She's nobody, Sam. Just a pretty MILF with a nice ass, and you couldn't remember her, because _that?_ Is way outta your league.’

‘Amanda.’

‘…huh?’

‘Amanda. The girl who wanted you to meet her parents.’

‘Oh, uh... Yeah? Well…guess it's a good thing we didn't hang around long enough for that, huh?’

‘Yeah…right.’

‘…’

‘Dean?’

‘C’mon, Sam. Let’s go.’


	74. Coda: 'Sex and Violence'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was nothing worse than being abandoned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so am I the only one who found it very interesting that the Siren's MO was a beautiful woman for all her conquests until Dean? At which point she mimics the ideal Dean holds as Sam in his heart. Really? I'd say that was about the cleanest cut case for Wincest you could ever get. At the very least, it speaks to Dean's near unhealthy attachment to his little brother and how NOTHING is more important to him. Jeepers...

_It's not the demon blood, or the psychic crap…_

His skin still itched with the Siren’s venom. The demon blood had liked it, shaking at its chains and howling in joyous fury at the hot jealousy etching itself in his veins, at the anticipation of his brother’s blood slick on his hands. He shuddered, leaned over the toilet bowl, and wretched again. 

… _it’s the little things. The lies. The secrets._

The fear in Dean’s gaze all those months ago, eyes wet and angry, had crushed Sam, made him doubt everything he was doing, caused him to pull the plug on Ruby, because there was nothing worse than loosing Dean all over again while he stood right there in front of him. Or he had thought there was nothing worse.

_I don't know when it happened. Maybe when I was in hell. Maybe when I was staring right at you. But the Sam I knew, he's gone._

His stomach clenched. He brought up more sour tasting bile.

It had sounded like defeat, like surrender, like Dean had given him up for lost. And without Dean to ground him, Sam was left flapping free in the darkness at the end of a very tenuous tether. 


	75. Coda: 'Death Takes A Holiday'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The road to Hell...

_If you think your intentions are good, Sam…_

Sam sat shotgun in Ruby's Mustang, eyes sliding to her diminutive profile every few seconds. If he didn't know what evil lurked a millimeter below her skin, he could mistake her for innocent, even childlike. 

She hadn't promised anything she had not delivered—except Dean, but Dean had figured that one out long ago—and her motives were…good. In the end. She was trying to make Sam powerful enough to take Lilith out. Maybe if he'd been a better student before Dean’s time was up, his brother wouldn't be in the shit shape he was now. 

And he was doing this for Dean. This was all for Dean. It was revenge for Lilith taking him away, and reconciliation for not being able to stop the hounds or drag him back from the Pit no matter how hard Sam tried. 

… _think again._

He forced his eyes front and wondered if he'd been duped anyway.


	76. Coda: 'On the Head of a Pin'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually wrote two other lengthy codas to this particular episode: Withdrawal and Recovery I and II, if you're interested.
> 
> Happy three-fer!

He stood beneath the street lamp, wings outstretched, and felt the chill breeze through his feathers. 

He did not need to feel cold, or warmth, or the slick heat of blood between his fingers when he lifted Dean's body into his arms, helped Sam lay him across the back seat of the Impala and watched him drive, tires squealing on wet pavement, to the nearest hospital. 

He didn't need to feel the crushing weight in his chest or the sympathetic prickle behind his eyes as Dean turned away, in tears, frightened, broken more now than his already cracked and shattered soul had been before this farce with Alistair began.

He didn't need to feel anything at all.

But he chose to.

 

***

 

He was sick to his stomach, on the verge of throwing up. Ruby's blood and the power it bought thrummed in his veins, pounded in his head, and he wanted to stick his fingers down his throat and vomit it all back up. And then go kill himself an angel. 

For nothing. It had all been for nothing. 

Dean was beaten, broken, as close to death as he had been since the accident two years ago. Castiel claimed he could do nothing for him; and Sam was shaking, bones knocking together in their sockets from the beginnings of withdrawal. 

He'd never drunk so much, gotten so high, but he'd never needed to either. Alistair was a power all his own, and Sam couldn't calculate what he needed to bring him down, so he'd left Ruby drained, weak and unconscious, on the hotel bed. And that had been for nothing, too.

The demons were not after the angels. They were killing their own. 

 

***

 

_And it is written that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in hell. As he breaks, so shall it break._

The words followed him into his dreams, chasing him down even deeper than the drugs in his system could take him. They rattled in his head to the rhythm of the legos left in the heater vents as Sam drove the Impala toward Sioux Falls. They whispered and whimpered in his ears, keeping Sam's pained keening company in the dark as he came down off the high that had let him twist Alistair's guts into garters and then yank them free of his meat suit. Something Dean had not been able to do in the end. 

_The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it._

Dean reached across the space between their narrow beds and slipped his hand under the blanket to feel Sam's damp, hot skin and his hammering heart. Sam's breath hitched and he flinched like the touch caused him pain, then turned his head to look at Dean through the moon-silvered shadows. 

'Dean…?'

Dean closed his eyes, let his hand slip away. He barely had the strength to look his brother in the eye knowing the lies that lay behind them. How did anyone think he was strong enough to bring an end to a war between the powers of chaos and creation?


	77. Coda: 'It's a Terrible Life'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean was fine with a Hunter's life, but if he'd never had a choice, then that meant Sam didn't either, and THAT was not something Dean was willing to accept.

It was a truth he wasn't prepared to deal with, one he couldn't believe. 

_You're a hunter. Not because your dad made you, not because God called you back from hell, but because it is what you are._

The Life had him. There was no question he'd do anything else. He'd made his choice years ago, probably before he'd been conscious of it, probably the moment John had handed him his first Zippo and told him to toss it into the grave of Alexander Schmeidler who had been strangling young women in the town out of misdirected vengeance for a cheating wife who'd murdered him with a garrote of pearls he'd bought her for their anniversary.

But he'd always believed in another life, one where Sammy brought criminals to justice under the long arm of the law and Dean worked on cars for a living and they fucked each other senseless every night until the wee hours of the morning. He couldn't do it—it wasn't in the cards anymore—but it was there as his alternate reality, his other _choice_. It was _his_ normal. 

He didn't believe in destiny. He didn't believe angels, or God, or some cosmic plan had designed him to be this. It was circumstance and a long line of choices and he had to believe in _that_ , because if he didn't, there was no way out. 

Not ever. Not for him, and not for Sam.


	78. Coda: 'The Monster at the End of this Book'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And God did...nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this one was a little 'off book'. I was completely in love with the scene between Sam and Chuck in the hotel because, knowing what I know now about Chuck, it was almost too easy to see him trying to point out to Sam what he was doing and that it was wrong and he really needed to stop because this wasn't how he'd planned on things developing. I don't even know if Chuck was God at that point in the writer's heads, but I could definitely see it. 
> 
> PS 'There's A Monster at the End of this Book' is an actual book and for anyone who has never read it to your kid? Shame on you. Go get it. Now. It was my favorite...much to my mum's everlasting dismay and the thousand and one times I made her read it to me before I would succumb to Byron and Shelley at bedtime.

He'll look back later and think he could have turned the tide in that moment.

_Come on, Sam. I mean, sucking blood? You got to know that's wrong._

Dean will blame him for not putting a stop to it all right then.

_People pray to you…and you do nothing._

Sam won't even remember. Or if he does, he'll be too overawed in the moment to lay blame.

_I prayed. Maybe they got lost in the spam or something…_

But it had to play out. They'd never see or understand, not even when it was all there in front of them, and that was something he had not planned on, but it was a good side effect, he thought, in the end: their utter blindness but for each other. That level of love couldn't be designed or created, and it would save them. It would save everyone. They just couldn't see it. Not yet. 

But that was okay.


	79. Coda: 'Jump the Shark'

‘Maybe we can bring him back. Get a hold of Cas, call in a favor.’

The thought had occurred to Dean already. The kid hadn't deserved to die like this. He was innocent, no matter Sam’s convictions about his cursed Winchester blood, but Dean couldn't drag him back from the dead only to thrust him into this shadowed world of monsters. There would be questions. Too many questions, and Sam’s pitiless, flatline speech about the Life being all consuming and any kind of connections being a weakness still sat souring in Dean’s stomach. He didn't want to watch the instant replay if they managed to haggle a resurrection out of Cas. 

‘No. Adam’s in a better place,’ he lied, but it didn't matter.

Better the kid was dead and at peace, or at least just dead.


	80. Inter-scene: 'The Rapture'

He could feel himself being pushed away, down into darkness with no promise of return like there had been before. His life was ebbing, his ability to distinguish himself at the edges of his soul grown murky and muddled. The only clear thing was Claire’s eyes, the brush of her soul against his as Castiel, for the few heartbeats of his transit from one vessel to the other, held them connected more deeply than Jimmy had ever thought possible. He felt her heartbeat in his chest, steady and strong beside the faltering thud of his own, and he wondered for a brief second if this was what it would have felt like to hold her in the womb, a connection only a mother heretofore could ever know. 

_Daddy, I love you…_

The words came from such a distance, he wasn't sure if it was his dying ears grown hard of hearing or the connection pulled too tenuous and thin and finally snapping into silence. 

He drew breath to answer her, but the light of his angel swelled up inside him, swallowed him whole, and then there was nothing.


	81. Inter-scene: 'When the Levee Breaks'

It boiled up in him white–hot and desperate.

‘You're a monster.’

Grief–stricken, stuttering, voice wrecked, the words sounded like the end of everything, even to him. 

Sam nodded, head bowed, the corner of his mouth ticking up in a smile of acceptance, and Dean realized he'd expected as much, like he'd already heard the words before. 

The fight that came after was just the release of rage, on Sam’s part because after all these years he still couldn't earn his brother’s trust, he was still wrong no matter what choice he made, and he was never good enough; on Dean’s part, because he had done all a man could do for love––he'd sold his soul and gone to Hell. He'd set Sam above everything and everyone, to save him, to keep him alive, to keep him from skating over the edge into darkness, and it was all for nothing. 

He'd be surprised if his ribs weren't cracked, maybe even a lung collapsed from the effort it took to draw a breath.

‘If you walk out that door, don’t you come back!’

His vision was blurred, possibly a concussion, mirror glass stuck in the skin around his eyes from where Sam had thrown him into it, and his ears were ringing, but they worked well enough to hear the slam of the door as Sam walked way. Again.


	82. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Lucifer Rising'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Twofer...

He'd seen his boys upset before, and yes goddammit, they were _his_ boys. John Winchester may have been their father, but it was Bobby that did the worrying, took the frantic phone calls from Sam in the middle of the night when John and Dean were gone too long on a hunt; held Dean’s head while he puked his guts up the first time John had tangled with a Were and Dean had to call Bobby (always in the middle of the night, these kids) and get instructions on how to kill the venom and then sewed up the wound himself. Bobby had been proud of him, in equal amount to how pissed he was at John for getting himself into a situation that forced an eleven-year-old to put his damn innards back in order and patch him up. He'd lasted until John was sleeping and no longer shouting in fevered delirium, then he'd hit his knees in the bathroom and retched for a solid twenty minutes while Bobby held him in silence. 

He wanted to hold Dean now, to tell him he could make it right. It was irrational and so far from the truth that the kid would probably make him swig holy water just to be sure he wasn't possessed; but telling him that wouldn't help. Dean was angry, so much so that he'd gone past furious and hit resigned and was balanced on the knife’s edge of defeat. He knew, too, if Dean plummeted off that edge, the moment he could never forgive himself for giving up on his brother wouldn't be far behind, and the apocalypse would be a tea party compared to the fallout from that. So then, fire with fire…

And the books went flying. 

 

***

 

Fingers curled in his shirt. He leaned in, fisting canvas and flannel. At the end of the world, he was not alone. 

When the cards were down and the lines drawn, anger held no sway over a brother’s love.


	83. S5 Coda: 'Sympathy for the Devil'

_Get in the car. Get in the car, get in the car, getintheGODDAMNcar!_

Dean twisted his hands on the wheel, dared the flick of a glance in the rearview to where Sam still stood stricken if not stunned. There was a sour taste in his mouth, and he had a mind to peel out of the parking lot and find the nearest bar and buy the bottle because he had a lot that needed drowning right now, and nothing so much as the shine of tears in the kid’s eyes. 

He was waiting, though, for Sam to follow like he always did, even when Dean tore him down, except he'd never torn him down quite like this before, never told him he couldn't trust him which was almost tantamount to disowning him in Winchester terms. And all that after the blow Bobby had dealt even if it wasn’t really Bobby, even if the man had apologized, and where the fuck had Dean been then, huh? Why the hell had he just stood by and let that happen?

_Get in the car, Sammy. Please…just get in the car._

He darted another look to the rear view. Sam’s bottom lip was sucked up and held hard between his teeth. His eyes were full. Dean could tell even from this distance. His hands were shoved in his pockets and he was rocked back on his heels, still reeling from the shock of his brother’s confession. Dean’s hand was on the door to throw it open and demand Sam get his ass in the car, because that would make it okay, give him time to fix it, hold everything in stasis until he could repair the damage. _  
_

_Get in the car, Sam!_

But Sam’s shoulders dropped, and he turned and walked back into the hospital under the harsh glare of lights, and Dean knew there was no bottle anywhere deep enough to drown the piercing ache in his heart.


	84. Coda: 'Good God, Y'all'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because it's right, doesn't mean it feels good.

Dean sat until the sun was well below the horizon, until after the family having a late season barbecue had long since packed up and gone home, until there was a biting chill in the air to match the one settled in deep beneath his ribs.

He'd let Sammy walk away.

Being an amicable parting didn't help the hurt, didn't make it any easier to watch his brother's retreating back this time than it had been…Jesus Christ, going on eight years ago now.

This was better. This was right. Sam was right. Dean didn't trust him, and nothing had hurt more than turning away from his instinct to charge after him when Ellen had come back alone. The betrayal still sat rancid in the back of his throat, because Sam had always been his first priority, but now it was a full time job, and they couldn't afford that. Sam had made the right decision, the hard decision, for both of them.

Dean shivered as a stiff wind cut across the clearing from the north. It sliced deep, but couldn't touch the frigid loneliness that had begun seeping through his bones.


	85. Coda: 'Free To Be You and Me'

The weightlessness of freedom felt good. But terrifying, too, like he was untethered with nothing to hold him earthbound, like he might float away and get lost. He'd had his feet set so long in sorrow, he'd forgotten what it felt like to be really happy.

_But Sam isn't here._

It was a small, persistent voice that turned his smiles down at the corners and cut off his full-throated laughter. He tried to ignore it. Reminded himself that Sam was the weight that dragged him down with worry and responsibility, made him spend so many of his days angry. 

He was his ground wire, too, though. Sam was purpose and a reason, because the monsters in the dark would always be there, and the fight would go on forever, and the only reason Dean had ever stayed the course was because every shadow he wiped out made the world a little better, safer place.

For Sam.


	86. Inter-scene: 'The End'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actively avoid this episode on re-watches because I hate post-apocalyptic stuff, but when I finally saw it again, I also remembered I loved it...
> 
> Happy three-fer!

'We're better off apart.'

He had to close his eyes against the words, against the reality they created, the fissure that split open and plummeted down into an abyss of loneliness at his feet. This was never the way it was supposed to go, but he felt the pull like a riptide that wouldn't release him, would jerk him under and drown him regardless of any fight he could put up. He could burst his own heart trying to stay afloat, but fate would have her say and the last word was separation.

***

'From what I understand, Sam didn't make it.'

He heard the words in his own voice, remembered what he'd said himself only hours ago—or five years ago. It was hard to wrap his head around, and even harder to believe that—

'You weren't with him?'

The abyss was there again, only deeper, darker, and he almost couldn't remember that this wasn't where he belonged. Here, he had failed, made the wrong decision and defended ground that had gotten his little brother killed. He watched himself duck away, mouth twisting in that so familiar smile that smacked of guilt and derision and self-blame. 

But none of this had actually happened yet, he had to remind himself. His Sam ( _Sammy. Jesus, Sammy…_ ) was still alive, pushed away but not yet abandoned. There had to be a chance to change this. 

***

'Zachariah tried to teach me a lesson,' Dean said into the silence of the car.

Sam slid him a calculating look, not sure if the statement was meant to be rhetorical. 'I guess it worked?' he said uncertainly, after a long pause. 

'No,' Dean answered. 'No, actually, it backfired pretty badly on him.'

_You're telling me you haven't learned your lesson?_

_Oh, I've learned a lesson all right. Just not the one you intended to teach._

'How so?' Sam asked cautiously.

Dean smiled, sad and turned down at the corners. 'He thought showing me a future where I said no to Michael would change my mind.'

'And it didn't?'

'Not the way he wanted.'

'Oh? How come?'

Dean looked at him then, and Sam saw the flicker of something deep and eternal that he hadn't glimpsed in a long, long time in his brother's eyes.

'He forgot my faith…was in you.'


	87. Coda: 'Fallen Idols'

_We, I said 'we' need training wheels, Sam…I want this to be a fresh start. For both of us._

Sam had wanted to believe it then, and he wanted to believe it even more now. No way was Dean ever going to let him grow up so much that he could get out from under the umbrella of his big brother's protection—that could cover entire continents, Sam was sure—but maybe they could finally find a level of reciprocation, rebuild that trust, that had been so badly beaten, into a new shape, a stronger one.

_I was so worried about watching your every move that I didn't see what it was actually doing to you._

Sam glanced to the passenger seat where Dean was slumped in the corner against the door. He smiled fondly. 'At least the blinders are off now.'

Dean snorted softly in response, stirred, half-smiled at some flicker of a dream behind his closed eyelids, but stayed sound asleep to the hum of the road, resting easy in the gentle roll and tilt of his baby on the curves beneath Sam's strong hand—and Sam took that as a surer sign of change than all the promises in the world.


	88. Coda: 'I Believe the Children Are Our Future'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean hated losing the best potential weapon they had, but he hated seeing the guilt in Sam's eyes even more.

'Sam.'

Sam looked up at the mirror. Dean was behind him, arms crossed, leaning in the frame of the door looking straight back at him. Sam pushed a damp hand through his hair and reached for a towel, couldn't hold that intense gaze.

Dean stepped forward, one hand reached out to pressed flat into the space between Sam's shoulder blades. Sam shuddered.

'Sammy, you thought you were making the right choice.' Dean took another slow step into Sam's space and curled his fingers around Sam's hip. 'Doing the wrong thing for the right reasons…sometimes that's still the right thing.'


	89. Inter-scene: 'Th Curious Case of Dean Winchester'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death wasn't an option. Not for Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I couldn't do the humor in this episode any kind of justice seeing as how I was born without any sense of one. I went with my usual angst instead...

Dean didn't care about the risk to himself. Never did. It was the big brother in him. The brother who would protect Sam with every breath in his body. Sam had tried to save Dean before and failed, and maybe there was cause in that for Dean to believe Sam wouldn't succeed this time either. But there was something Sam knew that Dean did not, that Patrick did not, and Patrick didn't have the power or the years to go up against the ace Sam had up his sleeve.

Because the devil wasn't going to let him die.


	90. Coda: 'Changing Channels'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean doesn't believe in destiny. But...

Dean slipped under the covers, bare-chested, skin to skin against Sam's back. God, it had been so long. Too long. Sam stiffened in surprise and then relaxed back, shifting to allow Dean's arm around his chest.

'What Gabriel said,' Dean whispered. 'About it always ending with us?'

'Yeah.'

Dean turned his head to press his cheek against Sam's shoulder, to listen to his heart beat in tandem with his brother's.

'We can fight that…right?'

Sam said nothing, just laced his fingers with Dean's and drew them up close under his chin. Dean shuddered against him and moved closer.

'Destiny or no,' Dean said. 'We go together.'


	91. Coda: 'The Real Ghostbusters'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whether Dean wants to admit it or not, Damien had a point.

Dean drummed his fingers on the wheel, chewed his lip in hesitation. ‘Sammy…would you still…?’

  
The cursor clicked and skidded across the laptop screen under Sam’s thumb. He didn't look up, distracted by his search for obscure demon signs to try and track down the Colt and Crowley.

  
‘…would I still what?’

  
‘Never mind.’

  
Sam continued to click and skim through forums and weather reports.

  
Dean ground his teeth, hissing slightly. ‘Damian. He said. Before we left. He said, uh… No. No, never mind.’

  
Sam cut him a look. ‘Dean…’

  
‘Forget it.’

  
‘…yes. The answer is yes.’ Sam was still looking at the screen intently, but his hands had stilled over the keys.

  
Dean started, wheel twitching to the side a fraction in his clenched fists. ‘What?’

  
Sam pressed the laptop closed, submerging the car in darkness, pressed his hands flat against the slick plastic. ‘I would then, and I still will now. Always. Because he was right. That is the point.’

  
‘Sammy…’

  
‘It’s the only thing that makes it worth it, Dean. Knowing we would both go that far, to those lengths.’ Sam looked over at him, eyes un-shuttered, soft and open like they had been once in a past so distant Dean almost could not remember it. ‘And only for each other.’

  
Dean tried and failed to swallow around the lump in his throat, to clear his next words of the raw emotion lodged there. ‘Jesus, Sammy. After…everything?’

  
‘Yes. Because that doesn't matter. None of it matters. Just you.’ Sam smiled, looked up through his lashes, almost coy. ‘And you haven't got the patent on self-sacrifice. So you're aware.’

  
Dean smiled, easy and unthinking, hands smoothing over the steering wheel again. ‘Bitch.’

  
Sam lifted the laptop screen, smirking out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Jerk.’


	92. Inter-scene: 'Abandon All Hope'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy two-fer!

Two years distant from the haunted, furious baying and slavering of invisible jaws, and Dean's blood still froze at the sound, the putrid scent of their bloody breath, rotten flesh caught in their yellowed fangs from previous victims. His guts knotted hard and tripped him up, sprawling him in the street. He could feel the weight, the trembling power of their gargantuan paws through the ground, the hot mass of them coming closer, bearing down on him, claws clicking and scrabbling on the asphalt.

  
He could see them. Not like they were really there on this plane of existence—four paws, two ears, and a nose—but like gashes of darkness in the fabric of reality, tears leaking the stink of Hell-fire and brimstone, advancing closer until—

  
A shot. And another. The sharp percussion of them in the wet air throbbing against his eardrums, kickstarting his terror frozen heart, and he scrambled up and back and away from the black splash of blood and smoking wounds, yelling a warning,

  
‘Jo! Stay back!'

***

_Tell me something Sam, any of this sound familiar?_

  
Sam fought with the anger, wrestled it and the stinging memories still too close to the surface.

  
_Monster._

  
_Freak._

  
_…I'd want to hunt you._

  
Sam stumbled back through the bracken, dropped at Dean's side, hand to his brother’s chest, under layers of flannel and canvas. Still breathing. Still here.

  
Still here.

  
That was the difference and always would be. Dean had said those things—in anger and fear, torn down to the very soul of himself that he couldn't find a way to rise above his own prejudices, that he’d failed to protect the thing most precious to him. Sam could still feel that, in the moments Dean thought he wasn't looking, the softness in his gaze, the love that still lived there; or the times Sam was nearly asleep and Dean would pause to tug the blanket up closer or reach to pull his coat closed against the night-time chill of the lmpala.

  
He had that. He would always have that. Dean had been tested, stumbled and fallen in his purpose, but he had never abandoned all hope. That was something Michael and Lucifer couldn't comprehend and would never share.

  
The importance of hope that could inspire the impossible.


	93. Inter-scene: 'Sam, Interrupted'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never really did understand why they titled this episode 'Sam, Interrupted' because even after about four times through, I'm still convinced this episode was about Dean.

_I mean, apocalypse or no apocalypse... monsters or no monsters, that's a crushing weight to have on your shoulders. To feel like six billion lives depend on you... God... how do you get up in the morning?_

  
Good question, he'd said, and it was. For anyone else.

  
He had to save the world, because this was all his fault. Sure, Sam may have set the Devil loose, but it was all brought-to-you-by Dean Winchester, breaker of the first seal, apprentice to Alastair, and Lilith's bitch. He had a lot to atone for so, yeah, he had to save the world; and some where in the back of his mind were all the six billion souls the Doc was talking about, but Dean was really only concerned with one at the end of the day. Sam.

  
He got up in the morning because of Sam. Sometimes only because the kid had made such a damn wreck of the world and somebody had to clean up the mess; sometimes because he was a wreck himself and needed someone to look after him and who else was there but Dean; and sometimes...sometimes because Dean loved him so damn much he could hardly breathe and loosing the kid, to Satan or the Boogie Man or just his own goddamn soul-eating guilt, was an unacceptable endgame.

  
Yeah, Dean had to save the world. Thing was…to Dean, Sam _was_ the world.


	94. Coda: 'Swap Meat'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is kind of a 'take one' and 'take two' since I couldn't decide how I wanted the scene to go, but I felt Sam's seeming abandonment of anything resembling the future he had once craved had to be addressed. 
> 
> The first is clean, the second is rated 'E' for explicit.

‘You know, Sam, you don't have to play it so tough.’

  
Across the room Sam’s slow, even breathing didn’t alter, but Dean knew he was awake. Kid had never been able to play possum with Dean worth a damn.

  
''M not playing tough,' Sam finally mumbled, disinterested, punctuating it with a yawn.

  
Dean muttered a soft epithet. 'You're allowed to want a future. Sam...to hope for one.'

  
Sam said nothing. Dean turned toward him, just able to make out the dark outline of him against the crescent moonlight from the window.

  
'This isn't the end, Sammy,' Dean insisted in a stubborn whisper like it was some secret they couldn’t afford to be discovered.

  
Sam turned his head and looked at Dean for a long moment. In the near non-existent light, Dean cold barely make out the whites of his eyes. He thought he saw the curve of a smile at the corners of Sam’s mouth, but there was nothing humorous or happy about it.

  
‘Not for you,’ he said very quietly and rolled over to face the wall, leaving Dean to stare at his back with wide, wet eyes and a feeling in his chest like he had been emptied out of everything.

 

***

 

'What happened to normal? T-to...safe?’ Dean huffed.

  
‘Think this is normal?’ Sam gritted, fingers hooking around Dean's hip joints and holding him as he slammed in hard. He laid over Dean’s back, pressed his mouth to his ear. 'Is anything about this normal or safe?'

  
‘Sam—'

  
‘You want out, Dean? Fine. You want the apple pie life? I won't stop you.’

  
Sam slammed in again, and Dean shuddered beneath him, broke apart on his brother's dick driving into him like he was drilling down for the last oily, viscous remnants of Dean's soul. He came with a sharp cry and collapsed under Sam’s weight. They breathed together, hot and ragged, into the passing minutes between.

  
‘I don't.’ Dean finally found his voice, ruined and rasping. 'I meant…you. You Sam. You're acting like…there’s no more future after…'

  
Sam smiled against Dean's sweat slick skin, but Dean could feel the icy chill of it without looking around. Sam rolled away and withdrew then, and Dean gasped at the sudden empty ache in his ass, but even more so at the creeping, cold void settling in his belly and chest, a foreboding at Sam’s silence and something else that felt so much like acceptance of his fate that Dean curled in on himself, sick and shaking, and cried silently while the shower ran behind the closed bathroom door.


	95. Inter-scene: 'The Song Remains the Same'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A moment with Michael.

  
'Fix him,' Dean demanded, voice choked.

  
'First, we talk.’ Michael smiled. It felt warm on his lips, like this 'John' already held some unknowable affection for these strangers who were his sons. 'Then I'll fix your darling little 'Sammy."

  
Dean flinched and Michael felt it in his soul—or in the stripped down, pristinely clean, utilitarian approximation that was all any angel could lay claim to, even God's finest. But he felt it nonetheless. The urgent desperate wanting, the silent tortured outcry against the absence of that which made a whole, and whose absence made a jagged broken edge across the breadth of the universe. Michael knew that pain. He'd felt it before.

  
‘I raised him, took care of him in a way most people would never understand.’

  
He stared down at the body. Bloody, lifeless. The soul was gone, already returned home to Heaven. And how easy it would be to just leave it there, to let this all be done, because the cold bite of clairvoyance, this foreboding view into such a near future spread out on the floor at his feet, filled him with…regret.

  
But there were no emotions for the likes of him, only his Father's unbending will.

  
He knelt, pressed two fingers to Sam’s forehead, let the cold consume him and break across his lips in another, much more brittle, smile as he got back to his feet.

  
‘Free will's an illusion, Dean.’

  
_For all of us._


	96. Coda:' My Bloody Valentine'

The hand was heavy and warm and calloused, and it took Dean a heartbeat and a swallow to bite his tongue against a muffled, 'Sam…’

  
'C' mon, son. You’ll catch your death out here.'

  
The same warm hands (big, but not big enough) guiding him out of damp, stiff, cold clothes, pushing him back into bed and covering him with a thick but love-worn quilt.

  
Other hands, smaller, thinner, daintier somehow, but steely, wiry-strong, touching his forehead, brushing still rain-damp hair away from his temple.

  
'I could help him sleep.'

  
'Nah. Leave him be.'

  
At least the screaming had stopped.

  
Later, hours later, after midnight but before dawn, came soft scuffling at the door, muffled whispers, a weight on the bed behind him, and hands again. Tentative but desperate this time, searching against his curled back, his flanks, pushing up under his shirt to feel for his heartbeat.

  
‘He'll be all right here?'

  
'Funny thing 'bout them boys. Put 'em together and it seems to heal all wounds. Some times slower than others. But always.'

  
Dean leaned his weight into the body behind him, the hands still barely-there-hovering on his skin.

  
‘Get some sleep, Sammy,’ he whispered.

  
There was a long, hitching sigh, a hot cheek pressed against his shoulder, and Dean finally, _finally,_ fell asleep to the reassuring rhythm of his brother's breath against the back of his neck.


	97. Coda: 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'

The look in Sam’s eyes said it all, and Dean knew the rest. It was sitting at the back of his throat, sour and sharp. Jealousy. And he hated himself for it. Hated himself for those dark, angry whispers: why him? Why her? Why here? Don't I deserve my loved ones? Why the fuck couldn’t you bring back John Winchester instead of all these nobodies!

  
It was selfish and he wanted to gag with it, vomit up the hatred, let it burn away in the flames of the pyre.

  
He chanced a sideways glance at Sam, saw the flared nostrils, the popping muscle at the back of his jaw, the angry sheen of tears fighting to fall, and knew his brother was thinking the same: why him? Why her? Why here?

  
Why couldn't it have been me?


	98. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Dark Side of the Moon'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two-fer folks. This was another of those episodes so perfect that it felt like sacrilege to attempt to write anything about it, and I tried like hell not to go there. I really did. But in the end? Yup. I went there. Right into the trashcan with the amulet.

‘You thought you were doing the right thing.'

It was quick, a learned response, one he had trained himself to make to cover all his doubts. Or maybe it was hope. If he said it enough times, it would be true. Because he didn't care if Sam deserved it, or if it was justified, he was damn well going to be in Heaven with Dean where he belonged. Or they could both go to Hell together. 

Either way, didn't matter to him.

 

***

 

He didn't miss the weight of it around his neck, the way it stuck into his skin when he rolled over in his sleep, or got tangled in his clothes when he stripped off to take a shower. He didn't miss it getting stuck on the gearshift when he was giving his baby's dash a rub down, or the way it knocked against his breastbone when he yanked it free again. He didn't miss being strangled by the leather cord when some bastard got a handful of shirt and coat and inevitably the amulet, too, or how it smacked against his teeth during a fight. He didn't miss cleaning all its tiny crevasses of monster guts and his own blood with a toothbrush.

He didn't miss the way Sam's gaze sat heavy, forlorn, and little-boy-lost between his shoulder blades as Dean let it slip from his fingers into the trashcan with a loud clang.


	99. Inter-scene: '99 Problems'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don't ever tell Dean Winchester what he can't do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks it's been that kind of day, so this got posted at work *raps knuckles with ruler* BAD GIRL. 
> 
> As an aside...I've constantly wondered about the title to this episode, and as I was posting this chapter I noticed it was chapter 99--one for every episode. I wonder if they were referencing that...?

He was teetering, undeniably. But when that bitch got astride him and goaded him (Y _ou’re pathetic, self-hating, and faithless_ ) that was the tipping point.

He’d already been halfway there with her promises of loved ones returned and the unlikeliest of revelations that _he_ was a Chosen One. Even Sam’s desperate plea ( _You can’t do this. You can’t do this to_ me. _I can’t count on anyone else. I can’t do this alone_ ) had fallen mute on his ears at that point. Because this town was tearing itself apart in the name of God at the behest of the Devil, and there wasn’t a damn thing he or Sam had left up their sleeves that was going to save any of them.

And this was just the trial run.

_It’s the end of the world, and you’re just going to sit back and watch it happen._

His sudden certainty in that moment was like a flash bomb at the back of his brain. The aftershock of it cleaved his doubts and stole his breath and he felt his feet hit bottom—connect with the solid ground of only one right choice to get the win.

‘Don’t be so sure. Whore.’


	100. Coda: 'Point of No Return'

Sam wasn't sure what hurt worse: his brother's sharp-barbed words spoken in shattered tones of regret ( _I don't believe. I don't believe in you_ ), or the hot tears on the back of his neck now where Dean's face was pressed in tight.

_You're still my big brother._  

It was Sam's 'I love you' spoken in the language they both knew best, and his already injured heart had cleaved under the axe-strike of Dean's complete bewilderment over the simple truth of Sam's enduring faith in _him._

Dean shifted closer, threading an arm around Sam to pull him snug into the cradle of his body. Sam huffed at the brief flare of burning drag against his insides. Then he settled and drew Dean's hand up to rest over his heart, pressing it there like through sheer force of contact he might be able to infuse his brother with the same faith he himself felt. 

Dean turned his cheek into Sam's shoulder, and Sam felt fresh tears heat his skin.


	101. Inter-scene: 'Hammer of the Gods'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vying for the #1 spot on this series 10 Worst Episodes...
> 
> This is still about the worst, ranking next to 'Bugs' and that one with Prometheus in it. It's only redeeming feature was Gabriel revealing he might actually give a shit about something, the standoff with Lucifer, and Lucifer CRYING.

He was prepared for Michael.

He'd had millennia in the freezing dark to build his defenses against that hurt, and he was no fool, it was going to be the deepest wound he'd ever suffered to strike down his own brother. 

But this, Gabriel, his baby brother standing on the offense, his eyes on fire with a familiar kind of resolute passion he himself had once felt—that, he had not expected. 

Angels lacked the ability to shed tears and the motivations to do so. A flaw, perhaps, in their Father's design. So, it was a gift of Hell that he was able to stand here now and mourn; but a curse as well because, for all the times he had raged and sobbed against his father's abandonment in the depths of the Pit, the tears had frozen in his eyes before they could fall.

Now, he felt their searing heat against his human skin and wondered if there was any power in the universe that could heal the pain of them.


	102. Coda: 'The Devil You Know'

It was a dance. A dangerous, beautiful, lethal slow dance with a devil, not _the_ devil—that would come soon enough—but one of what was evidently many from Sam's past. It turned Dean's stomach sour and his blood cold to think Azazle's influence, on Lucifer's behalf, had stretched so far back in their lives.

And, for that, Dean couldn't deny Sam this little piece of retribution, a chance to raise the bar before the title fight.

He watched from the shadows, how Sam moved, the lion to Brady's mouse—nothing wasted, no energy spent in extraneous motion. Just silence. Dean wished he could see Sam's face and at the same time was glad he couldn't. He was afraid of the smile when the knife slid home and knew the leap of his heart was not only out of pride and shared satisfaction. It was something else, too, something darker that Dean didn't want to see in his little brother's eyes when he turned around.

So he told himself it was a trick of the light, and let Sam pass him by.


	103. Coda: 'Two Minutes to Midnight'

_What exactly are you afraid of? Losing? Or losing your brother?_

Was there even a question there? Dean wondered, leaning in the doorway of Bobby's library where Sam had crashed with a book spread across his lap. If Dean lost Sam, then he lost everything. It didn't matter how many people they’d save, or that they’d be giving Lucifer, and Michael, and God and all his angels a big middle finger. 

One thing equaled the other. With Sam gone, it was game over for Dean.

Dean took a pull from the beer in his hand and pushed off the door. He pulled the book from Sam’s lax fingers and gave the kid a light push on the shoulder until he tipped over and turned his face into the cushions with a soft snuffle. Dean tugged the thin afghan off the back of the couch and tucked it over Sam’s shoulder. He stood still for a minute, staring, struck to the core by a thousand overlapping memories of a thousand moments like this one over the years. Moments that, after tomorrow, there would be no more of.

He brushed a strand of hair from Sam’s cheek and whispered,

‘Love you, kiddo.'


	104. Coda: 'Swan Song'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People, you can't mess with perfection. So I didn't even try...

There was a new kind of silence to his world, and it took Dean a little while to figure out why:

A heartbeat was missing. 

One he didn't know how to live without.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so draws to a close the Kripke Era. 
> 
> Onward!


	105. S6 Inter-scene/Coda: 'Exile On Main Street'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There were so many points of pain in this one and so little satisfaction what with Sam being soul-less, that I couldn't fix on just one.

He wanted to love her. She deserved that, not just because she put up with a broken, crazy shell of a man always on the knife’s edge of destroying himself out of grief, but just because of who she was. If he could get a real toehold on this life, it could be good. Perfect, in fact. She was perfect in her little cotton nightgown with blue flowers and satin ribbons against her olive skin; dark hair tumbling around her face; eyes inviting him to leave his past behind and join her here and now. 

How could he ask for anything better?

Only he wasn’t asking for better.

He was just asking for his brother back.

Try as he might to stuff Lisa and Ben into that empty space in his heart, they couldn't fill it. It was too big, too Sam-shaped.

Maybe it was pointless to try. He’d had the love of his life already, his soul mate, and lost it. That wasn't the kind of thing a person got to call ‘do-over’ on.

——

‘It was really good to see you again, Dean.’

_You, too._

_Stay._

_Don't leave._

_I’ll come with you._

_I love you._

All the answers lodged in his throat, and all he could do was bite his lip and watch that POS sports car pull out of the drive with Sam behind the wheel when it should have been his Baby and him and Sam headed out on the road again; because his heart was beating out of his chest with the want to call out, to stop Sam from going, to bring him back, tell him to wait.

But he barely managed a wave, and the car disappeared from sight. 

——

'I’m good.’

_You’re not good. You can't be good. Stop lying! Stop lying to yourself. How could you_ possibly _be good? The people you loved most_ lied _to you! Left you to rot in your own grief. Fuck the fact that it was supposed to be for your benefit! He let you suffer a year thinking  he was dead and now he’s alive and you've let him walk away…_

_And you hate yourself for it._

_Can’t have that apple-pie-life, Dean. Sammy’s right. It wasn’t made for you._

He poured another shot of whiskey. What was this? The third? The fourth? He'd lost count and the bottle was a third gone.

‘I’m good,’ he said again, nodding.

Like he might eventually be able to convince himself the words were true.


	106. Inter-scene: 'Two and a Half Men'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Folks, things might get a little ugly until Sam gets his soul back. Like Dean, I'm flailing here without my Sammy...

‘You’re hunters. _'_

_And what are you, Dean? What makes you different? A year out of the life playing house? All that’s gotten you is rusty and restless, and now you’re standing on the wrong side of that thin grey line._

He hadn't the first clue in Hell what he would do with the baby. It was a monster, after all, and the irony of that wasn't lost on him. He should probably have his head examined. A couple of days ago life had been pretty cut and dried. Not exciting, but stable, or as stable as he was ever likely to see. Now, he was protecting a monster against people who were just like him.

And he knew what he was, make no mistake, but it didn’t change the deep bite of Christian’s jab, or the doubts it resurrected. Doubts about just what kind of life he was fit for; even in his dreams it wasn't a life of devoted dad and loving husband. His dreams were still dark and full of blood, screams from the shadows, and the smell of salt and gun power. 

Yeah, they were Hunters. 

So was he.


	107. Inter-scene/Coda: 'The Third Man'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The thing about prayers was, they needed a soul to carry them...
> 
> Hell can break a man in lots of ways, and Dean began to think he may have gotten the easy treatment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It always bothered me that Cas didn't answer Sam. I figured there had to be a good reason, and 'Dean and I share a profound bond,' was _not_ it. My apologies to those who might have planted their belief in Destiel on that admission from Cas, in case you're reading this.

‘Dean and I share a more profound bond.'

It was pitiful as far as excuses went and a weak rejoinder. He knew he'd got it wrong when he saw the look on Dean's face, but how could he say, 'I couldn't hear him,' without raising questions for which he had no answers. 

So, he lied. It was one human trait he had retained, by design or something just lodged in the circuits when he was reconstructed, he didn't know. 

'If I had any answers, I might have responded. But I don’t know, Sam.' Cut to the chase, skip over the questions…avoid that resounding silence standing right in front of him. ‘I have no idea what brought you back from the Cage…or why.'

_And I have no idea how you can be standing right there, and I can feel nothing from you._

Castiel feared little. He had little reason to. But there was a pervading chill settled in the bones of his vessel as he met the empty void of Sam Winchester’s eyes.

——

He'd felt something wrong in the dig of Sam's fingers in his arm, holding him back while Cas pilfered that kid's ethereal guts for Balthazar's John Hancock.

But this…

'So you’re saying, what? That you're stronger than me?'

Because this was the kid who had told Fate and a Reaper to go screw themselves in order to snatch his big brother back from Death’s door. This was the kid who tried to save a werewolf because he believed the good in her might be able to contain the monster within. This was the kid who fought demons and darkness and Dean himself to keep his brother from going to Hell because he believed there was something in Dean worth saving.

'No. Just saying we're different.'

Yeah different. Different like a heart hardened and innocence lost; different like a kid who had outgrown all those ideals of good triumphing over evil. But Dean had surrendered the right to protect those things in Sam when he let him jump in that hole.

Sam may not be able to see it, but the damage was there. That kid had gotten lost on the road to Hell. 

Or maybe just left behind…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sort of belatedly realized that Dean's internal answer to the question of Sam being stronger actually proved Sam _was_ pretty strong even though I had intended the opposite. Make of that what you will...


	108. Coda: 'Weekend At Bobby's'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bobby picks Dean and Sam up at the airport after their trip to Scotland.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I toiled over this one, folks, and it's still pretty weak. I loved this episode because it's a rare look into Bobby's life and everything he does for so many people, but I just didn't have much of anything worthy to offer in addition to it, so.

'Ever heard of long term term parking, kid?' Bobby said, leaning on the Chevell's quarter-panel, arms akimbo.

'Leave my baby with all these ordinary cars where she might get scuffed or scratched or…vandalized?' Dean shuddered and shoved his bag into the trunk along side Bobby's collection of the accoutrements of their trade.

'Where's Sam?'

'In the can. Had to hold it on the way over.' Dean grinned. 'Sasquatch couldn't fit in those tiny bathrooms on the plane.'

'Well, some things never change,' Bobby chuckled. 

Dean's face fell. 'Yeah…'

Bobby put a hand on Dean's shoulder, squeezed hard. 'Look, what I said… We're gonna figure it out, Dean. I promise. You just keep on keepin' on, and I'll keep diggin' around. Something's gotta turn up.'

Dean nodded, keeping his gaze firmly on the ground, hands dug into his pockets.

'Don't you clam up on me, boy.' Bobby gave him a hard little shake. 'I'm here for you. No matter what. Any time you need. You know that.'

'Yeah.' Dean swallowed hard and nodded again, chancing a brief glance up and squinting into the noonday sun to hide the sudden tears. 'Yeah, I know. Uh… Same goes, you know?'

Bobby eyed him carefully, not fooled in the slightest. 

'Yeah, son,' he said slowly. 'I know.'

 


	109. Coda: 'Live Free or Twi-hard'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Hope is the thing with feathers,'
> 
> \--Emily Dickinson
> 
> Her poem did not end like Dean's did.

'No matter what happens, I can always count on you. Right, Sammy?'

For half a second he wished for the fetid power of the vampire blood still to be thrumming in his veins, so he could hear the lie between one too-steady-beat of Sam's heart and the next. His own was slamming hard against his ribs, angry-hard and afraid. Terrified. He could see the slip-slide of quick, calculated thinking behind Sam’s eyes.

Dean held his breath. 

_Hope is the thing with feathers…_

‘Yeah. Of course, Dean.’

Dean let out the breath, slow and juddering, heart tripping over the cold absence in Sam’s gaze.

_And both its wings are broken._


	110. Inter-scene: 'You Can't Handle the Truth'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a tiny pinch of Destiel, because of all the scenes past and present with Cas, the one where he filled up Dean's glass was my favorite.

He was ashamed of himself. His brothers and sisters were fighting and dying on the battlefield, drenched in each other's blood, and he was here.

God had restored him for more than this. With a purpose, he thought, to bring order to the chaos. But he could not ignore the chinks in all his reassembled pieces that longed for nothing more than to be here with this man. 

He picked up the bottle of whisky, tipped it to the lip of Dean's glass, filled it all the way up. He didn't miss the sharp frown of confusion at the gesture. If only he had the time to ease the pain in Dean's eyes, but with all the healing power of Heaven at his beck and call, even that was not possible. 

Dean drained his glass, glared at Castiel, hurt and angry. 

'What happened to you, Cas? You used to be human, or at least like one.'

_Yes_ , Castiel thought. _For you, once, I was that._


	111. Inter-scene: 'Family Matters'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean's tired of fighting monsters, especially the ones that look like his brother.

The puzzle pieces slid into place, each one slick with lies and blood.

The lies were Sam's.

The blood was Dean's.

He shuddered in the sharp, cold breeze, but sucked in a deep breath of it like it might be his last. He couldn't have stayed in that room for one more second. 

_His soul…it's gone._

He'd felt himself falling in that moment, like watching Sam fall all over again, into the dark and the Pit and oblivion. He wondered how many times would be too many, and his own soul would gutter out in silence, snuffed out by the pain. 

There was a monster inside, at his back, behind that door. He wondered if he had the strength to fight them all.


	112. Coda: 'All Dogs Go To Heaven'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one gets a Mature rating, folks.

_And it was... It was kinda harder, not having a soul. But there are also things about it I remember that I..._

 

They hadn't touched, yet. Not like this. Sam might remember, but he couldn't _feel_ , and Dean hadn't wanted—still _didn't_ want—to. Not while he could see or hear or think.

But he could do none of those things now. 

The lights were out, curtains drawn to black, and the only sound was breath and the thrum of blood.

Sam was inside him, huge and hard, pounding him like he wanted to pierce right through to the center of Dean, cleave him open and gorge himself on all his soft insides. His hands were hot and rough and bruising, and Dean could pretend. He could pretend. Because they'd done it like this before, when death had nipped too close to their heals, and they'd needed to feel alive, to feel this, each other, solid beneath their hands. 

They could remember, and it would do for now.


	113. Coda: 'Clap If You Believe'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I think this is among the episodes you either love or you hate, and I LOVE it. Nothing beats the image of Dean as Jiminy Cricket, or Dean squinting and asking, 'Nipples?' and getting boxed in the nose by a fairy while Bowie's _Major Tom_ plays in the background. Nor Sam's line about 'pizza-rolling' Tinkerbell. So, as not to dim the comedic perfection of this episode, I give you something from way out in left field...

He didn't bother looking in the mirror much. 

At first he thought he'd be scared of what looked back, but when he discovered he had no fear, it didn't really matter. He looked to shave and straighten his tie and paused to stare at the color-changing eyes in the reflection, just to check, to see if there was a flicker of something he might have missed. 

It should bother him that it didn't bother him to meet that emptiness head on. 

Dean said he should care. 

Dean said he needed to empathize.

Dean said his soul would give him back his pain.

Sam stared hard at his reflection, watched the light get sucked in.

Getting his soul back meant being in pain, learning to hurt all over, for things he could do nothing to change.

Sam didn't see the point.


	114. Inter-scene: 'Caged Heat'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It isn't for Sam's benefit Dean is fighting so hard.

'He needs his soul!'

_Does he? Does he need it?_

_I think_ you _need it, Dean._

You _need Sam's soul. You need him to be whole again._

_For you._

_Because you are broken without him. Incomplete, untethered, ungrounded._

_Bleeding._

_Worthless._

'Of course,' Cas said simply, because Dean was not a man to be argued with when his brother's life was at stake. No warning he could give would bear any weight against the very simple fact that Dean could not live without Sam.That he could not see the anguish he would cause—by his own hand—the one he loved and hoped to save, was not necessarily his fault. 

After all, what man could be asked to live with only half of his own soul.

A sentence Cas suspected was far worse than living with no soul at all.

 


	115. Coda: 'Appointment In Samarra'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is something to fear when a fearless man screams in terror.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one got a little out of hand, but I had to send Soulless!Sam out with a bang.

Dean had been afraid plenty in his life. Facing off with Death— _mouthing_ off to him—was probably about as afraid as he could ever remember being. He wondered idly in the back of his mind if he wasn't tempting the Horseman to do his worst, because all his cards were played. No more aces up his sleeve, no more miracles waiting in the wings. He was stuck with a soulless little brother who had finally resorted to patricide—or the closest thing to it given the circumstances—and had proven he couldn't be trusted any further than Dean could see him across a small room. 

It wasn't a situation Dean had any desire to live with. And maybe that was Death's endgame anyway, a convenient excuse to rid the universe of its two worst pennies. No more turning up for them at the wrong time. Or the right one either for that matter.

As afraid as he was of Death, though, it didn't compare to the terror that gripped his innards and momentarily stopped his heart when Sam started screaming as the Horseman force-fed him his own ravaged soul. Because if a man who had no soul, no conscience, and no emotions could be that afraid…

Dean shuddered, dragged in a breath, swallowed past the hard push of bile at the back of his throat, and reached out to find Bobby's shoulder. He fisted his fingers in the worn flannel and started to pray. 

 

'No! No. Please! You don't know! You don't what'll happen to me!'

Sam was shouting at the top of his voice, struggling against the thick leather restraints, but no one moved. Not even Dean, and he was sure he remembered somewhere, in that musty collection of memories he was growing less and less connected to, that Dean wouldn't allow this. He couldn't stand by and watch Sam be hurt. It wasn't in him to do that. 

But there he stood, rooted to the spot in the door, face twisted in fear and grief, regret and…hope. There was no help for Sam there.

Death leaned over him, resolute, holding the thing that was Sam's soul. It glowed dimly, reddish-black. It oozed and bled around his tightly clenched fingers. It looked like so much shredded and rotting meat in his hand. Nothing resembling any imagined incarnation of a human soul.

Dean's eyes and face reflected a terrific light when Sam turned to look at him one last time, ready to beg for his life, to make promises of any number and any kind to be allowed to remain free of that fetid thing Death was pressing toward him; and he knew in that moment that they could not see what he saw.

He glared at Death.

_You are coming back, Sam. If this is what it takes. But believe me, if your brother could see…he would never allow this. He'd sooner slit your throat himself._

Sam's eyes shot wide at the sharp words that cut so clear across his mind.

Then he was engulfed in flames, drowning in blood, every bone shattering, brain boiling, lungs exploding, muscles tearing, flesh ripping, insides clawed and spilling outward. Everywhere there was the stench of burning entrails and the high, terrible shrill of his own screaming—

And then it all went black.


	116. Inter-scene/Coda: 'Like A Virgin'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three moments following the return of Sam's soul.

Dean had heard the old adage about the heart skipping a beat. He’d never really believed it until Sam said his name. 

‘Dean?’

It wasn't like he hadn’t heard it in the last six months, traveling around with the empty shell of the thing pretending to be his brother. Sam had said his name plenty of times, but it was always lacking the same thing Sam was…soul. The sound of it had come to feel like needles under his skin, pricking and prodding until he found his teeth snapping and grinding together at every mention of the innocent syllable.

So, his heart skipped a beat.

It wasn't a trite fairytale reaction he wanted to own up to, anymore than he would the pinpoint hope he'd held hours (or days…Jesus, had it been that long?) ago that Sam might awaken at the press of Dean's lips against his. But that was supposed to be true love’s first kiss, so maybe it didn't apply. It certainly wasn't their first, and true or not, their brand of love wasn't ordinarily accepted into the lexicon, so maybe that discounted it, too. 

But there it was, a definite skip. 

'Dean?' 

His heart stopped on the sound of Sam's voice uttering his name, staid for the space of a full beat, and then stumbled over itself to move on despite a distinct lack of breathing on Dean's part as he spun in his chair. 

'Sammy?' 

It was their 'I love you’—their names. Quiet, clean, simple. Able to say so much when it was neither the time nor the place to say anything else. 

And he’d missed it.

***

Sam's soft-breathing drew Dean's attention from the laptop screen. He was slouched against the headboard, book on his lap open to the last page he'd been reading. His mouth was slack, chin to his chest. In another lifetime, Dean would take a picture of him and make fun of him for drooling later. 

Not now. 

Try as he might. he couldn't tear his gaze away from his brother's sleeping face, peaceful but for the perpetual pinch between his brows that Dean was absurdly relieved to see after the last long months of apathetic blankness. 

_Do you sleep?_

_No._

_And you didn't think there was something_ wrong _with that?_  

Well, all was right with the world now. 

Sam twitched in his sleep, sighed, and rolled sideways, tipping down onto the bed to sprawl across the book that dislodged from his lap and the pillows. He muttered something unintelligible. 

Dean pushed the laptop closed and rose to flip the corner of the comforter over Sam's legs. He wrangled the book from beneath his brother's weight and sifted a hand through Sam’s hair, rubbing gently at the crease in his brow with the pad of his thumb. The worry etched in Sam's skin soothed and released beneath Dean's touch, and he turned his face into the pillow with another quiet sigh. 

‘Sweet dreams, Sammy.’

***

Sam smoothed his palm down his brother's spine, felt him shiver and tense beneath his touch. 

‘I’m sorry, Dean.’ 

He leaned forward, pressed his lips to the nob of bone just beneath Dean’s hairline. Dean let out a compressed breath. 

'I'm so sorry,' Sam repeated. 

He went to his knees slowly, both hands grazing lightly down Dean’s naked flanks, lips leaving a warm damp trail down the trough of his spine. Muscles fluttered and twitched under his hands, clenching and releasing like they expected pain but at the last second remembered there wouldn't be any. 

Not this time. 

Sam pressed his cheek into the hollow at the small of Dean’s back, breathed there, while his brother quivered in anticipation and…something else. Tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes. 

‘I am so, so sorry, Dean.' 

There weren't words enough in the world to apologize for what that monster, wearing his skin and voice and face, had done to his brother; not enough tears in all of time to wash himself clean of the sins he had committed. 

Dean turned, wrapped his arms around Sam’s shoulders, kissed the top of his head softly. 

‘Love you, Sammy.' 

It seemed, though, that there _was_ a bottomless well of forgiveness in his brother's heart.


	117. Coda: 'Unforgiven'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll have to indulge me on this one just a little. it's actually meant to take place just after Sam wakes up on the floor in the next episode, so we're just going to pretend.

Dean was shaking. He was hiding it well, staying in motion, meticulously and vigorously cleaning their weapons—but he was still shaking. Sam watched him from the opposite bed where Dean had installed him the minute they got inside the room. He couldn't remember Dean looking this scared since...ever, There was probably a time somewhere back in their patchwork lives, maybe in the beginning when Dean had still known what fear was, but Sam couldn't remember it; and especially not since his brother had been to Hell. 

‘It's okay, Dean,' he said quietly. 'I’m okay.'

  
In truth, he wasn't sure of that statement. He was exhausted at the very least, and he felt to the core of him like he'd been turned inside out and carved up like roasted meat over a fire pit. But he could well afford the lie if it would bring Dean some peace of mind.

  
Dean’s hands worked harder rubbing the gun oil into the metal until his finger slipped and he cut himself on the slide. He slammed the piece onto the table, cursing. Sam flinched. It was only a quick blink of his eyes, the rest of him was too sore for anything else.

  
'It's not okay, Sam. This is not okay!'

  
Dean's voice escalated quickly until he was shouting, and then he was on his feet pacing, cursing some more and sucking at the cut along the side of his ring finger. Sam pushed himself to sitting on the bed and tried to catch Dean's hand as he passed by, but Dean shrugged him off.

  
'How is this okay? How can you say this is okay? How can you even think any of this is okay!' Dean was still shouting, and he was trembling so hard his teeth were nearly chattering with it.

  
'I'm still here. Dean,' Sam said simply.

  
Dean glared at him hard, but then his expression suddenly crumpled, and he was on his knees at Sam’s feet.

  
'How long?' he whispered, voice wrecked. 'How long do I get, Sam? Before he steals you away from me again?'

  
Dean was on his haunches, head bowed, and Sam’s heart broke to see the defeat written in the sagging line of his shoulders.

  
‘Cause I can't, Sammy,' he continued, brokenly. ‘I can't do that again. I can't give you up again.’

  
Sam reached out silently, big hands sliding over the soft bristle of Dean's hair to clasp lightly at the back of his neck. He dragged Dean up, pulled him across his body as he lay back on the bed again. Dean followed willingly, molding himself to Sam's length.

  
'He said it would last a lifetime,’ Sam whispered finally, petting slowly at the back of Dean's head. ‘But even if it doesn't, I'll take this…a year, a month, a day, a night... This moment. I'll take it, Dean, and make it mine, to carry me through a thousand years of Hell if I have to.'

  
Dean gulped a ragged breath but said nothing, and Sam held him, shivering and shaking, until exhaustion finally stole them both into sleep.


	118. Coda: 'Mannequin 3: The Reckoning'

'For what it's worth, I've got your back.'

  
Not so long ago Dean had stared across the same roof of this same car and listened to his brother say those same words. It hadn't been a lie then either, not entirely. Not that it would have mattered. Sam was family, and Dean had stuck with him, would always stick with him, soul or no soul _because_ he was family.

  
_You’re_ __ _a liar, Dean! You know you're walking out on your family, right?_

  
It was the sweetest agony and ironic, too, to realize he had slotted himself so well into Lisa and Ben's suburban fantasy that he had convinced them both he fit in their lives. And for just a little while he'd almost convinced himself.

  
Then Sam had shown up and the ruse was over. The artifice of normal fell away like a dream—a nightmare he'd been struggling to escape.

  
They'd been his for the taking—the life he’d always wanted, wanted for Sam, for John. The life they should have had. In the end, they were just another job, people he had to save from the monsters in the dark; and none more so than the one who sat at their table and laid down to sleep with them at night.

  
They weren't the answer to his heart.

  
That answer was watching him cautiously from across the car, making promises he probably couldn't keep, because when had he ever? But he was family, the only family Dean would ever know…or need; and family stuck together.

  
‘Yeah. I know.’


	119. Coda: The French Mistake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It wasn't just a second chance for Sam.

  
'What about you?'

  
Sam was fingering the sloping topography of his brother's back in the dark, tracing bone and muscle from memory.

  
'Hmm...?'

  
Dean sighed into his crossed arms where they pillowed his head and lifted slightly into Sam’s touch.

  
‘You figured I'd want to stay. Like you said—no Heaven above, nor Hell below; but what about you?' He flattened his palm, pressed it into the curve of Dean's lower back. ‘The hits _have_ been coming since I was six months old, but I'm not the only one, Dean. What about you? It was a chance for normal, for safe…for Lisa. And Ben.'

  
Dean’s ribcage expanded once and held, and Sam’s hand stilled. He bit his lip. Waited. Dean said nothing. The moment passed. Dean breathed it out slow and shallow and turned his face deeper into his arm.

  
Sam dropped his cheek to Dean's shoulder blade, folded himself up against his brother's side, and kept the silence.


	120. Inter-Scene: 'And Then There Were None'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watching this episode again, for some reason it struck me in all the tiny expressions and subtleties, that Sam was still Dean's little brother, and Dean would always watch out for him. Probably could have taken a lot of other things away from that episode, but there you go.

It had been a while since he'd seen them in action together, forgot how in sync with each other they were, like shadows they moved as one, in silence, whatever communication that passed between them having been honed down to a look, a brush of skin, the press of fingertips, a breath held or let out. Competent, both of them born-in-the-blood Hunters.

  
For all that, there was a hesitation in Dean, an acute watchfulness in the glinting green of his eyes, an ever present readiness in his taut muscles, afraid to let his guard down, to let Sam get too far from his side. To let his little brother out of his sight.

  
He'd lost too much, too many times, so that even the slam of a steel door cutting Sam off from view was almost too much for him to bear.

  
'Sam! _Damn it. Son of a bitch_.’

  
Underneath the frustrated anger was the electric charge of terror and Bobby could only hear the panicked keening of, _no no no, little brother lost_ , because for all they were equal in skill and, truthfully, Sam was the strongest in more ways than one, he would always be Dean's little brother, forever held with the care and protection such status afforded him.

  
‘I'm gonna go around, okay?’

  
‘Okay. Watch yourself.'

  
_Little brother_.


	121. Coda: 'My Heart Will Go On'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It hadn't been a perfect alternative, hell, not much off the one they lived...but it was just different enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really kind of thought Cas was a selfish bastard for making the boys remember the alternate timeline just because he wanted to try and impress on them the importance of what he was fighting for. Problem was, Cas forgot that fighting for the little guy is the most important thing, and that's what Sam and Dean are all about.

He’d thought about not following Dean out to the junkyard, stayed behind to watch Bobby sleep for a little. It was a rare thing these days to see the old Hunter at peace, and maybe he still wasn't, but it was better than watching him drink to drown his friend's memory.

  
Sam sighed and secured the corner of the blanket Dean had spread over Bobby beneath the old man's shoulder, tucking him in as it were, and then shuffled quietly out onto the front porch, crunched across gravel, and found his brother exactly where he suspected.

  
Dean held up a beer without a word, cap already popped off.

  
He'd been waiting.

  
They drank and stared out out at the steel grey afternoon for a long time.

  
'Thinking about them?' Sam finally asked.

  
Dean took another long pull from his bottle, and for a second Sam doubted he'd answer.

  
‘Selfish, fucking child.' His voice was rough with simmering anger. ‘Wasn't bad enough we lost them once… And just so he could prove his point.'

  
Dean laughed, short and sharp, jagged at the edges. 'As if we don't know the odds, what it means to stand against them. Like we don't understand war.'

  
His smile was thin and dangerous.

  
'Been at war all our lives.'


	122. Inter-scene: 'Frontierland'

The floor came up to meet him, almost broke his nose. He couldn't stick his landing with the leaking wound in his side.

  
'What the hell!' Bobby barreled in, shotgun primed.

_  
Safe haven. Sanctuary_. He wrote it on the wall, fingers sticky with his own blood.

  
‘We runnin' or fightin'?' Bobby asked, calm, ready to do whatever it took.

  
Whatever it took.

  
That's why he fought for them, sacrificed for them…loved them.

  
But the machinations were getting complex, the means to the end starting to weigh too heavily. His own skewed motivations were weakening him, leaving him here on a dirty kitchen floor seeking shelter from those he had charged himself to protect.

  
He staggard to his feet, determined.

  
‘We’re...'

  
The floor came up to meet him. Again.

  
But it never reached him—apparently, even angels had guardians, even if they wore flannel, carried shotguns, and smelled of whisky—and then the world went black.


	123. Coda: 'Mommy Dearest'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think was catering more to my needs for brother-closeness than to the actual epsisode. Sorry about that. :)

The bite was healed, but he swore he could still feel the burn of her fangs under his skin, resisted the temptation to touch just to be sure. Behind him, the screen door squeaked forlornly on its hinges.

  
'Dean?'

  
Sam came out, stood for a second letting his eyes adjust to the dark and stepped up behind him. He toed gingerly at the mostly full bottle of whisky by Dean’s hip, made a soft sound of surprise in his throat.

  
‘Not much in a celebrating mood,' he said to Sam's unasked question without looking around.

  
Sam picked up the bottle and squatted behind Dean, rocking back until his butt hit the dry wood with a thud, then his long legs stretched to bracket Dean’s hips. He set the bottle aside, scooted up until he was snugged warmly to Dean's back and dipped his head to press his nose and mouth to the curve of his neck.

  
'We got her Dean,' he said after a while.

  
Dean leaned back, put his hands on Sam’s knees and squeezed hard, let Sam put his arms around him and tug him back in close.

  
'Doesn't feel like a win,’ Dean whispered roughly.

  
Sam’s mind flashed on the lifeless, bloody bodies of the boys they'd tried to help. He made a tiny, hurt sound. Dean squeezed his knees again.

  
'No,’ he said, voice matching Dean's for roughness. ‘No, it doesn't.'

  
They sat quiet for a while, until Dean spoke again.

  
‘Gotta figure out what those demons are up to. And Cas…' He broke off, dropped his head, slumped in Sam’s hold. 'It just doesn't ever…end.'

  
There was nothing Sam could say to that because his brother wasn't wrong. He reached for the whisky bottle, loosened the cap with his teeth and spit it out into the dark beyond the porch. He took a long pull from it and then handed it around to Dean. Dean tipped his head back, swallowed once, twice, three times, gave a little huff and a cough at the persistent burn, handed it back to Sam.

  
'Fuck Crowley,’ Dean spat succinctly.

  
Sam lifted the bottle and drank to that.


	124. Coda: ‘The Man Who Would Be King’

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The power of words.

Alastair had favored flaying, and he was talented enough that he could strip a body’s skin off in several layers, making the poor soul under his knife suffer thrice or more the pain. Dean remembered vividly the featherlike touch of the blade lifting off the thinnest layer and leaving his meat exposed to the agonizing burn of sulfur and fire. It was like being baked in an oven, the heat intensifying with every stripped off layer.

  
Then the gutting would begin, hours and hours of screaming as his insides were sliced and parred and peeled until he was hollowed out, a few scraps of meat and sinew clinging to a rack of rattling bones, beyond screaming then because his vocal chords had been artfully shredded and left unable to produce anything but a terrible rasp.

  
For such surgical precision in his work, Alastair had kept his blades sharp. Even laying the flat of one against the skin would leave a cut. Dean had never knowing anything sharper, before or since.

  
‘You can’t, Dean. You're just a man. I'm an angel.’

  
Until now.

 


	125. Coda: ‘Let It Bleed’

‘She said he was my son.’

  
Sam stilled but didn’t look up. ‘Demons lie, Dean.’

  
Dean drained his glass. Another glass. Sam had lost count a few hours ago. The bottle at Dean’s feet looked fresh, though, so he’d probably polished off at least part of one already.

  
‘Yeah. They do.’ The clink of glass on glass and swill of liquid pouring made Sam cringe. Dean swallowed half of it. ‘But then she said she was lying.’

  
Sam’s eyes flicked up, and his stomach clenched in a sudden, fierce knot. ‘So if Demons lie…she was lying about lying?’

  
‘Telling the truth.’ Dean’s words hadn’t begun to slur yet, and Sam wondered if it was just his tolerance to the alcohol or if he’d already passed drunk and come back around to sober since the bottom of the last bottle. ‘Could’ve been.’

  
Dean got up off the couch, polished off the amber in his glass, and set it and the bottle on the desk in front of Sam. Sam dared to look up into his brother’s torn open gaze, held it for a slow count of five, bloodshot and beaten. Dean may not have fit the apple pie life. He may have stepped outside of it for Sam with little more than a pang of guilt and a half-hearted promise to return; but it did something to him to have plucked loose that thread of a possible future and cut it off at the quick.

  
Dean blinked blearily, suddenly exhausted, and turned away. Sam watched him go, listened to the weighted tread on the stairs, the protesting creak of bedsprings as he collapsed under the press of his own grief. Then Sam reached for the bottle, poured himself a glass to the brim, swallowed fast, choking on the burn, to drown the sob rising up from his chest.


	126. Inter-scene: 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'

 

‘This is exactly what Cas wants. For you to fall to pieces.’

Well, it had worked. 

He'd tried so hard—so _damn_ hard—to keep Sam safe, keep him whole. To keep the wall intact.

‘And now we're right back where we started, baby brother,’ Dean whispered.

He was toying absently with the button on Sam's shirt, swirling the whisky Bobby had poured him in the glass so it caught the light, pulsed warmly, hypnotically. The scene was too familiar, made his skin itch at the memory of waiting, wondering when— _if_ —his brother would wake up and what state he'd be in. 

Death had warned them: Don't scratch the wall. 

And Cas had gone and taken a goddamn sledge to it. 

‘Jesus, Sammy.’ 

Dean curled forward, hunched, straining against the final fractures, trying to take Bobby's advice to shore himself up, hold himself together. For Sam. Because Sam would want it, would expect it, would do as much for him. 

‘Sammy.’

Dean set his glass down on the concrete, careful and slow, smoothed a hand over Sam’s shirt front, then stroked his jaw with the pad of one finger. He bent forward and pressed his lips to Sam’s forehead. 

‘Sammy, don't you leave me alone out here,' he begged.

But all that answered was silence.


	127. S7E1 Inter-scene: Meet the New Boss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was the hardest thing for Dean to hear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to Season Seven! And we’re off with a very depressing opener...

_You can’t help_.

  
It was a slash across Dean’s shredded heart to tally with the rest.

  
When Sam had proven his smarts and an enthusiastic teacher had enrolled him in an AP Chemistry class, he’d sweated his homework, gnawing on a pencil end, and when Dean had offered, Sam mumbled:

  
‘You can’t help.’

  
When Sam had taken his first real shine to a pretty thing with wide dark eyes, and John had packed them up and moved them in the middle of the night, one step ahead of the law, and Sam had sat in the backseat stifling angry tears, rebuffing Dean’s every effort to cheer him:

  
‘You can’t help!’

  
When Sam had strode into the night with nothing more than the clothes on his back and a duffle bag, angry echoes of barbed words hanging in the charged night air, and Dean had caught him at the bus station, breathless and begging, swearing he could make it right:

  
‘You can’t help…’

  
When Sam had lain on that dirty mattress, cold and white and the singular symbol of Dean’s abysmal failure at the sole purpose of his entire life, Bobby had very gently said:

  
‘You…can’t help.’

  
But he had helped—he had fixed it—and it had brought them to this, here, every step since then another scar across Dean’s soul.

  
Sam’s eyes were gentle, sympathetic. Accepting.

  
‘You can’t help.’

  
And Dean couldn’t bear to look.


	128. Inter-scene: 'Hello, Cruel World'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stone number one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What if the phone hadn't rung just then...?

'Believe me. You gotta believe me! Make it stone number one, and build on it.'

Dean let loose of Sam's hand, jammed the Taurus in his waistband and stepped up into Sam's space.

'Because the Devil can't make you feel this,' he whispered, and he slid his hands up into Sam's hair and pressed in and swallowed his little brother's startled exhale. 'He can wear my face and talk with my voice and even touch you in the ways you like most. But he can't make you _feel_ it.'

Sam stiffened, grew instantly hard at the desperate slide of Dean's lips on his. He reached under Dean's coat, under his shirts, felt warm skin and the pound of Dean's heart under his palms, and something in him cracked wide open as sure as Cas had split the wall in his head. Dean's hands fisted in his hair, held him steady while he whimpered and trembled under the flood of heat and memory, good memory, memories of Dean and his unflagging strength.

'This, Sam,' Dean said again, knocking their foreheads together. 'He can't imitate _this_.'

'N-no,' Sam murmured. 'No. He can't.'

In the back of Sam's mind, the Devil thrashed and flailed, gnashed his teeth and howled in impotent rage.


	129. Inter-scene: ‘The Girl Next Door’

'We thought you were dead.'  


'Well, I ain't. Yet.'  


It hurt to see the shadow of panic still in Dean's eyes, how, after all these years, he was still a little boy clinging to the shreds of a memory he called 'family.' Admittedly, the knot of desperation in Bobby's own stomach had loosened considerably when, after a hectic night of frantic searches and clipped phone calls, he tracked his boys down.  


His boys.  


Hell. Yes, they were his boys. They may have been John's sons, but they were Bobby's boys. He'd been the one to help Sam with his homework and teach Dean how to throw a football. The only thing John had helped them with was their marksmanship, and all he'd taught them was revenge and obsession. All three of them had gone to Hell for those lessons.  


Dean’s eyes searched, bleary, unfocused, still a little panicked. Bobby smiled and reached out.  


‘Hey,’ he said gently, patting Dean’s cheek, and it did his old heart good to see the flicker and flare of comfort, no matter how brief, in the boy’s gaze.

*** 

‘If you don't trust her, trust me. Please?’  


Fury erupted in Dean, bright and hot, because how could Sam even ask it?  


And how could Dean deny him.  


‘Yeah. Sure.’  


‘Really?’  


Dean nearly folded at that bright disbelieving glow—his Sammy all of six years old again, so eager, sure of his older brother’s trust and trusting just the same.  


And hadn’t he trusted? Hadn’t he trusted Sam when the cards were down and their luck played out? Sam had come through, too, taken the Devil back to Hell, saved the world; and Dean had lost everything. Because the thing Dean had really trusted in was that Sam would find a way to beat the odds—all the odds. Lucifer would go back to his Cage and Sam would come back to Dean.  


More than trust was broken that day, and some wounds never healed.  


‘Gotta start sometime.’  


The lie was ashen on his tongue. They’d been here before. 


	130. Coda: 'Defending Your Life'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean is definitely guilty, but of what exactly? And what right does Sam have to feel _good?_ Or what right does Dean have to begrudge him that?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two-fer

It wasn't guilt. Not over her. Sam was right. Dean hadn't killed Jo. The Hellhound had done that. Dean knew enough not to displace that kind of guilt. He wasn't guilty either over her hunting because of him. She'd worshipped her father and that ship was going to come in no matter what Dean did. Daddy issues she said. Definitely. Dean of all people knew what that kind of devotion looked like. 

What he was guilty over (and maybe Sam was right about that, too, he was actually just really, really sad about it) was the future he'd killed, and the hope that went with it. 

He wasn't Jo's type and she wasn't his: a good girl, an honest woman who would have expected the same from her man. She was untainted by shadows and the darkness she fought. That might not have lasted, but he had hoped. He had hoped for an end, to put a cork in the bottle forever, and give her a chance at a future even she didn't know she deserved, the same future that had been so brutally ripped from his brother.

And maybe that was where the guilt really lay. For Sam it was too late, he—they—were in too deep, too deeply entangled in the web of good and evil for any future that wasn't soaked in blood. But Jo had a chance, and Dean had been fighting to preserve it, consciously or not. 

So, if he was guilty, it was of that: of failing to hold the line, failing to keep the road clear for Jo and every innocent like her. Failing to keep hope—his hope—alive.

 ***

 _I feel kinda good_.

Dean watched Sam sleep, in that way he had always watched him, out of the corner of his eye, in his peripheral vision. There was an empty space there hollowed out just for Sam to fill. It had been there for decades, grown in size over the years to accommodate the one who filed it. 

He pushed the laptop away, swallowing a sigh, and picked up the cheap glass of whisky. He was tempted to leave the kid to his apparently peaceful dreams and go look up that very understanding bartender. Better whiskey. Easier company. Besides, he still owed her a night out, or in, whichever it turned out to be.. Anything at this point to take the edge off of watching the kid sleep—with his stupid soft, floppy hair and those really stupid side-burns he had grown lately that, for reasons he didn't want to bother looking at too closely, unaccountably turned him on. He didn't need that right now. Sam didn't need that right now. He owed the kid more than that, didn't he? Wasn't that what last night had proven? That he carried around enough guilt where his kid was concerned?

‘I feel kinda good, Dean,’ Sam had said, to Dean's utter surprise. And what right did Dean have to mess that up? Despite the hot burn of jealousy he felt over the admission. Hell had broken Dean. He’d failed when the chips were down and the line drawn in the sand. But, Sam? He'd been absolved of his sins. Make the boy the Devi1's bitch and suddenly his consciousness is clear. Dean knew it was wrong to think like that—made him a right bastard—but the alternative was accepting he was weak. So much weaker than Sam.

A fact that he really already knew was true. Whether or not he wanted to admit it.

 

 

 


	131. Coda: 'Shut Up, Dr. Phil'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was like taking a shot of his own medicine.

 'I mean... we're good, right?' Sam asked.

And Dean had answered with a quick slide of his eyes, 'We're good,' before he ducked into the car to punctuate the end of the conversation.

Sam was pretty sure he'd been a pain in the ass when he was young. Younger. It wasn't all that long ago, except that a century in Hell could really skew your perception of real time. Scratch that. He _knew_ he was a pain in the ass with all his sulking spells and myriad bitch-faces and constant, monotone I'm-fines. Dean had probably been nigh on to killing him, more than aware that his stubborn little brother was most definitely _not_ fine.

It must have felt a lot like this.

Sam couldn't pin Dean down for lying to him except that he knew now as well as Dean did then that they weren't even close to good. At least one of them wasn't.

Dean had always enjoyed his proverbial wine, women and song—so long as it was Zeppelin or some close relation thereto—but he'd always kept a solid separation between that and the job. Sam could recall more than one scolding when he'd let his own line get too blurry. It seemed lately, though, that Dean could only see dearly to the bottom of his next bottle, and the parallels that drew to their father didn't bear thinking about.

John had carried his own heavy load of guilt, his predisposition to taking responsibility for the world very similar to his eldest son's, or vice versa Sam supposed. His guiding star, though, had been his obsession to find Mary's killer, and somehow that had kept him focused and driven.

Dean didn't have that obsession, and he was floundering; and if Sam felt any residual guilt (despite his declaration to the contrary) it was for betraying his brother's trust one too many times to keep hold of the place in his heart that might have kept him grounded and going in the face of all this chaos. But Sam had lost his grip on that place, it was evident in the slide of Dean's eyes and the flat tone covering over the hurt.

Sam sighed in defeat and folded himself into the passenger seat. They were definitely not ‘good.'


	132. Inter-scene: ‘Slash Fiction’

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody puts Baby in a corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The missing good-bye scene between Dean and the Impala. 
> 
> I really hate this episode...mostly because Baby gets put on ice.

Dean stroked the hood slowly, deliberately, like he would a lover.

  
'Seriously?’ Frank muttered, rubbing his hands together against the dawn chill and stamping his feet a couple of times.

  
Sam rolled his eyes over to look sideways at the frumpy little man. He scowled. 'Just... give him a minute.’ He shoved his hands deeper in his pockets and watched Dean walk around the car, fingers sliding light across her glossy surface. Dean had insisted she get a bath before he put her in storage. He'd filled her tank with premium and given her a quart of fresh oil.

  
Sam knew it was all a stall tactic. He could see in the tight pull between his brows that Dean still felt like he was exercising the worst kind of betrayal on his beloved—telling her in their time of greatest need that she just wasn't good enough.

  
'Do they need a room?' Frank smirked.

  
'Shut it,' Sam said, dead pan. It wasn't anything Sam himself hadn't said in the past, but like the grandson of the Orthodox rabbi who could safely crack all the ethnic jokes he liked on stage for a paying crowd, he had earned the right by dint of his birth. Frank had not.

  
Frank started to retort, but something about the intensity in Sam's face shut him down. He sighed dramatically and sidestepped to the barn door as if being too near this unwholesome display of dependency might be catching.

  
Sam stepped forward quietly. 'Dean...’

  
Dean said nothing, but gave a sharp little nod and reached into the back seat for the heavyweight, weatherproof car cover, the best money could buy. He unfolded it slowly and Sam stepped in to help, giving the corner a little flip to garner a cushion of air that let it float down to rest on her still warm steel without the hint of a scratch.

  
When he had it tied in place, Dean put his hands flat on the roof and whispered something neither Frank or Sam could hear. It didn't matter. Sam knew the gist of it would be an apology for leaving her and a promise to come after her the very second it was safe to do so.

  
Sam tugged lightly on the cuff of Dean's jacket sleeve. 'We've got to go, Dean,' he said softly, like as not to wake a child that had just drifted off to sleep. Dean said nothing for a moment and didn't look like he was going to move. Sam was about to call again when Dean's gaze shot up and speared Frank in the crooked-framed barn doorway.

  
'You check on her,' he said sharply. 'Because if anything happens to her... I will find you.’

  
Frank's automatic, derisive smile stalled out on its spread across his face when he met Dean's hard gaze. He gulped then and gave a curt, grudging nod.

  
'C'mon, Dean.' Sam tugged again, gently.

  
Dean heaved a breath and then spun away from his beloved with a sharply muttered, "Sonofabitch..'

  
Sam turned and trailed after him a minute later, bestowing a gentle pat to the front quarter panel and a silent promise that he would look after Dean in her absence.


End file.
